I'm now facing a strategic decision about what to do with a large Pdox 5.0/Win 3.1 Property Management application (400+ tables, 500K+ lines of ObjectPal code, 250+ forms, 140+ libraries ) which I developed over the last 10 years for my condominium.

The system extensively uses the Woll2Woll ezDialogs/ezDoc add-on
programs. Although Woll2Woll no longer sells/supports ezDialogs/ezDoc,
I have a 32-bit version of ezDialogs that seems to work okay with
Win98SE. However, there doesn't appear to be a 32-bit version of ezDoc,
which I rely on to do global searches of all ObjectPal code for references to tables, fields, etc. (Without a global-search tool, I would consider the system unmaintainable.)

I'm trying to decide whether it makes sense to upgrade to Pdox 11 or
rewrite for a whole new platform (perhaps open-source tools such as
php/mySql).

I assume that upgrade will require SUBSTANTIAL manual effort to modify
code to deal with the lack of supported ezDialogs/ezDoc as well as the
normal incompatibilities from version to version of any software product
and to run a controlled set of tests to verify that it performs
correctly. For example, spot-testing shows variation in string()
method output (number 1234 is "1,234" in Pdox 11 vs. "1234" in Pdox
5). These details matter for programs exchanging data with specialized
external systems (e.g. security control for common-area doors, electric
submetering within apartments,

Does anybody have any ideas on the subject? Can you recommend any of the following:

-- Tools that would facilitate such a conversion (e.g. ezDoc had a
feature that would deliver all .LSL/.FSL/etc files in one directory
automatically)
.
-- White papers that might offer advice based on real-world experience
and/or highlight particular issues to consider.

Thanks for any advice/encouragement/amusing war stories you can offer <g>.

.....mandy

There has been considerable discussion over on the pnews future of Paradox list (http://pnews.thedbcommunity.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb.exe). You may know that Corel has deprecated Paradox - no further development is planned. Borland previously deprecated the BDE. The future of Paradox is not bright, although beta testing with the new Windows (Vista) has been hopeful - it appears Bill Gates hasn't broken Paradox - yet. Nevertheless, if you are looking at a major rewrite, why not consider moving to a platform that will be around in the next few years? That's what I decided to do. After considerable research, I decided to go with PostgreSQL and will be programming the front end with Java. I have no regrets about my decision. From just the database perspective, I can do things easily with PostgreSQL that were extremely hard with Paradox. There is considerable flaming between PostgreSQL and MySQL, but overall I think PostgreSQL is a more mature and more sophisticated product. Also, there has been a stir about Oracle's recent purchase of InnoDB - a component used by MySQL. This reminds me of Paradox's reliance on the BDE, not a good thing. The PostgreSQL community is very active and supportive - similar to the Paradox community.

Good luck with your project!

While i surely agree with you in having a good opinion of PostGRESQL, i would never choose java as to write an interface/ client code which would be mainly used on windows; simply put, it's too ugly and different from standard windows interface, that will have a steep learning curve for users; if moving out of "fat" client programming, i'll go for a web interface, using normal HTML pages to access the db.

Bye!

...However, there doesn't appear to be a 32-bit version of ezDoc,
which I rely on to do global searches of all ObjectPal code... You might try to run Ezdoc in compatible mode on Windows XP. If that works, and it should and there is no cost to try, then you can safely upgrade to paradox 11. There actually may not be a lot of code to upgrade as much objectpal syntax was retained over the years for just that reason. You would thus need only to upgrade items which fail. The biggest challenge will be some of the patches necessary because of networking changes from win98 to WinXP which affect file and record locking in paradox, depending upon the network OS you are using.

Lonnie