Re: WO vs Sun Studio Creator

On May 28, 2006, at 12:06 PM, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:

>
> On May 27, 2006, at 7:26 AM, Markus Ruggiero wrote:
>
>> Hi WO Folks,
>>
>> I have been in negotiation with a customer to bring WO into play.  
>> Now the customer just let me know via a short email that they have  
>> decided  against WO but are going with Sun Studio Creator. As I  
>> have never had any contact with this and I do not yet know what  
>> the customer's reasoning is (I am going to call him and ask next  
>> week) I am looking for any information I can find to compare these  
>> two (probably very different) things. I have already started to  
>> read but can you folks out there provide me with anything that I  
>> can bring into the discussion. So how does WO compare to Sun  
>> Studio Creator? The customer has been working with Oracle and  
>> Uniface and now needs to show some data in a web interface. They  
>> do not have any Java knowledge (at least not productive).  
>> Eventually a verrrryy verrrryyy large application will end up as a  
>> web based app with possibly HTML and rich java GUI. For me this is  
>> a typical WO candidate - however the customer thinks (I don't know  
>> yet)....
>
>  It's hard to talk customers out of things, because you should  
> never argue with a customer:
>
> http://www.notesofintelligence.com/influence/index.html
>
>  Instead, see if you can setup a demo with him where you can show  
> off some direct 2 web, direct 2 java, and direct 2 java client  
> stuff. Ideally with his own data, so bring a laptop, get connected  
> onsite to his data a couple of hours before your meeting, then do a  
> demo. Otherwise, setup Frontbase and run a demo from your laptop  
> showing how you can build all that stuff easily.
>
>  I don't have any direct knowledge of Sun Studio Creator, I assume  
> its yet another one of these programs where it looks like you can  
> sketch out your UI and connect to your database and it writes a  
> whole bunch of crap code for you. But showing the customer their  
> own data can be very compelling.
>
>  Then you can talk about the value you add, which is managing  
> workflow, designing better UI, setting up security, all the stuff  
> that one of these instant apps (or D2W) can't do.

I recently went through this same decision twice, both at my work and  
with a contract client. The arguments against WO/D2W and for JEE/Sun  
Studio Creator usually don't center around the technology, but  
support, maintenance, and the comfort of being mainstream. If they  
are going to have to maintain the app with their own resources,  
Creator provides a much more supported and mainstream environment,  
and there are certainly more, shall we say affordable, developers  
that are available to work with it.

Creator also demos very well. The manager doesn't mind that you throw  
primary keys around everywhere instead of object references, it's  
easy to drop a DB table into a page and have a snazzy-looking page in  
just a few minutes, whereas out of the box, D2W, while powerful and  
flexible, looks ugly and out-dated (and as I'm finally delving into  
D2W/Wonder right now, there is a serious lack of good-looking D2W  
examples that I could find. It doesn't seem to be that hard to pretty  
it up once you get into it, but that initial barrier turns a lot of  
people off I think). I think D2W will scale up to a big complex  
schema much better than Creator will, but many managers may miss that  
point during the demo.

Logan