Re: The future of pgAdmin II... - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew M. [mailto:initri@initri.com]
> Sent: 27 March 2002 21:59
> To: pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] The future of pgAdmin II...
>
>
> Dave,
>
> If there's one motto I've learned over the years.. "If it
> ain't broke, don't fix it."  Why move to VB.NET (C#, VB.NET,
> etc.) in the first place? What new features and performances
> increases are going to be made available over the VB6
> implementation of it ?

The main advantage would be cross platform capabilities provided by the Mono
project (when it's ready).

> I spent hundreds of dollars on Visual
> Studio 6, and have no intention of upgrading to VB.NET,
> because of cost concerns, and I'm sure there are many other
> developers that feel the same way.

Sooner or later most developers will probably upgrade. How many people do
you know that are still actively using VB4? It was only about 5 years ago
that that was the current version.

That aside, the .NET SDK is free and supposedly includes command line
compilers for VB/C#. I posted a URL for an IDE earlier. There is also the
free Mono compiler which works on Windows/Linux now, it just requires the
Microsoft class libraries until those are cloned as well.

> Perhaps in a few years it might really take off, but why lose
> the prospective developers that might join the project, that
> don't have VB.NET ?  A lot of people have VB6 now, as it is,
> and know how to use it.  You'd possibly be excluding an area
> of expertise, and developers that can't code in .NET.

Don't forget I'm looking forward to *at least* a year from now.

> Again though, why the extra work to convert it, re-test
> everything, when there is already a working project, that
> anyone can jump in and modify if they need to ?  It just
> seems like reinventing the wheel, when there is already
> something that works well.  Why spend the extra development
> time on a new .NET version, when you could be spending that
> time adding new features and maturing the current version(s) ?

After about 4 years, pgAdmin I got to the point where we just couldn't add
the new features we wanted because of the way the design had grown. After
much thought I decided to rewrite from scratch, taking into account how the
old code had grown and it's limitations and allowing for easy addition of
well structured new code. That's bought us a few more years, but we will
probably run into the same problems again. In fact, come to think of it I've
just committed a new feature to CVS which forced me to include database
knowledge in pgAdmin rather than pgSchema - something I always discouraged
myself and others from doing.

I can't stress enough - this *is not happening now*. I'm just considering
what form the next rewrite might take when it's required *in a few years*.

Regards, Dave.