[DUG] Demoing at a DUG Meeting - Accredo or otherwise

[Max Nilson]

Neven MacEwan commented: 

> The Profax/Accredo story reminds me of Bristol making cars, 
> it was said that they wouldn't buy in a component for 5 
> pounds if they could make it for 20, I've seen 2 Bristols on 
> the road in my life.

And I've never seem one, unless I did at the Southward Car Museum and didn't
notice.

> I admire there UI philosophy (If we don't like it we rewrite 
> it ) but can't agree with much else in the product.

What exactly do you disagee with in our product? I'm interested to see what
bit of our design and implementation would cause disagreement and with what?

> Which 
> leads me to think (somewhat vaguely related)
> 
> 1/ If Delphi is OO and encapsulated then why do some of us 
> insist on ignoring that at a macro level (and reinventing things)

We do use a lot of third party components for areas that we are not good at,
or that it is not cost effective to develop component in. Currently we use
Indy, Rave, TeeChart, Abbrevia, Virtual Treeview, madShi, WPTools, Toolbar
2000 in the application.

What we do not use is most standard Windows UI component, or any other
people components. Originally we used Infopower, but as soon as we needed to
extend the control to perform correct behaviour required by use and our
users they started costing too much time to modify. So it eventually became
cheaper to create own own control library and use that. Now that it exists
and is stanle we can extend and modify its behaviour extremely rapidly.

> 4/ Finally I'm dying to see how Paul et al does the DB 
> independance with triggers and stored procs trick, 
> intellectually because it is enormously difficult and fraught 
> with danger, and philosophically because its relatively 
> pointless.

I must disaggree here. One of our competitor products was designed Interbase
only. Then they hit the real world and needed to support MSSQL. And then
they got bigger and had to support Oracle.  There codebase is now a large
mess, and they spend to much time trying to keep three sets of triggers etc
in sync. Why not realise that to cater for a wide market you must support
what the customers demand you support and design that in to start?

Cheers, Max.