Thank you again, Dmitry.
Yes, I think that is telling. For fun, and getting a bit acquainted with the community somewhat : I have a similar story about one of our customers. You may recognize it : the largest company (in this case Cargill) and for one of its operating companies support was outsourced into the sky, and it took ten years before we were able to pass all the security stuff required to even perform an upgrade of their system. 10 years.
In those 10 years, our system "was able to" not have a single issue. If that would have happened, don't ask me what would have happened to that company, which is for a full 100% dependent on this software (that's life with ERP software).
And thus it indeed is so that one of its "partners" (we ourselves, an InterSystems partner (?), Intersystems themselves, should not bail out.
Or be bought out. '-)
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If this is too much of chit-chat for a decent community, someone will tell me ?
Thank you so much, Robert. Also for the warm welcome.
Over the course of time I will need to learn what is and what is not off-topic in here, as well as that at this moment I am not sure whether it is a good idea to create a thread about what task I put myself to. It could be interesting, or maybe not at all. ... So let me type ahead a little in here ...
The least I could try to bring across is that my explicit specialism is "performance" as such and you could say that from there I (with my company) implemented the first ERP system on PC's and Novell, back in 1987. Servers were 2x 386 @ 40Mhz, one for the table files, and one for the index files. PC's were XT's @ 12Mhz. Concurrent users 120.
The kind of sad thing was (still is) that I left my great MUMPS application at Shell/NAM, that served 80 concurrent users on a poor PDP 11 (the VAX just saw light when I left). It already contained messaging between users/tasks by a self-made protocol. I saw no future in MUMPS and nobody would be able to read the code anyway ...
Starting the ERP software, I taught (designed ?) myself up to some 9th normal forms (anyone ? :-)) and from there the highest normalized database emerged (with now 1500 centralized entities indeed plus 500 or so local ones).
Believe it or not, but the MS-Dos code in Foxbase and its DBF stuff, never was changed "manually" in the 35 years it now exists. Still it is now all Windows with Advantage Database Server (from Sybase) as the database. So all necessary code changes in order to technically and also functionally keep up to snuff, was all done by generation of the framework (which I tend to call an OS). The functional programs itself didn't even change (except for interpreting DB commands).
The system is so large that is is impossible to "rewrite" it. No low-code will help, and any perceived framework will only be counterproductive. So it is my conclusion that the framework itself already has to spring from (re-)generation and while at that anyway, the remainder of ~ 15,000 functions (think 15,000 forms) can be taken along just the same.
Where MS bought Fox Software (in order to let it die) and SAP bought Sybase (in order to let it die) there's nothing much more left than looking for tools who won't be bought. Is InterSystems that ? ... I'm an opportunistic guy.
Lastly for now, envision my quest for any coding environment that will allow for macro substitution. So really, once you're into that (this started for me with MUMPS back at the time) you won't like otherwise (Foxbase and DBase-like languages could do it too). But beware the moment that you have to leave (like my current situation) and can only re-generate. Then no real compiler is going to help you. And so, for now, I love the existence of InterSystems ?
But we will see.
If someone has hints, contacts perhaps, higher level objectives maybe ? I will be listening (in here or privately). It could be the idea to eventually outsource the lot and the rest is to your and my imagination.
And happy to answer questions of course ! (but bear my English please)
Peter
PS: The picture below shows some redundancy because of the various stacked other generated codes like native Visual FoxPro vs ADS, Dos vs Windows, Source vs Executables, a version which interprets Languages. But divide by 10 to be on the safe side.
Maybe it is easy for someone to hand a link to screenshots of "forms", created by means of the framework ?
Or a link to a website that uses it ? (content unimportant)
I just wonder whether something depicts similarities. It would not be a showstopper (depending on how it looks - haha), but I am just curious.