Commenting on subject, Alan said: > .... I have mixed feelings on the Buyout. > HP have always made wonderful hardware, but their applications > have always been dogged by failures to continue development. I would respectfully disagree a bit on one of the products Alan mentioned: > Transact was a very good 3.5GL language, when they bought it, > but none of the development it needed really ever happened. It's very true that there was the "on - off - on again" fiasco with Transact support and enhancement back in the days of Interex - Boston 1990; and the short period around the time of HP World - Anaheim in 1996 when we were again in a "no more Transact enhancements" interlude because of the continued slow decline in the customer base (initially aided and abetted to no small degree by the aforementioned 1990 fiasco). In fact, since 1990 HP has implemented a large number of functional enhancements to Transact/iX that were on the SIGRAPID enhancement list, that fell within what I would call the "current scope" of the product; i.e.: we did not get direct SQL support in Transact (which in retrospect now is probably just as well). And Transact is not the best "fit" for handling sockets-based client-server I/O on the net (look at Java/iX or C/iX or GNU C++ to do that). But for TurboIMAGE database I/O on the 3000, IMNSHO Transact is still hard to beat. Anyway, for the record the HP RAPID Lab in Roseville is still working on two important additional enhancements to Transact/iX, that I believe will be released sometime in 1999: (1) High-level support for all TurboIMAGE access modes; including IMAGE intrinsic B-Trees and TPI. (2) What HP calls "Open Transact": The ability to efficiently call Transact/iX from other languages by passing in external database and file ID's. This will avoid the current inefficiency of having Transact re-open databases and files when it is called from other languages; and should be a big help in running servers written in C/iX or G++ that call Transact to do the database I/O. But, to be fair I would also add that after the above two in-process enhancements are delivered, I wouldn't expect HP to deliver a lot of additional new features in Transact/iX.... Ken Sletten