What do people think of Gupta Team Developer?

Question

Has anybody any experience in using Gupta (formerly Centura) Team Developer?

If so, what do you think of it in terms of its capability to support the development of mature, scalable, maintainable applications?

Thanks

Answer 1

I have been working with Team Developer (formerly Centura Builder, SQL Windows, etc.) for 9 years. IMO things have not changed too much from the version 2.1 which Stephan Keller described in his comprehensive answer.

The company I am working for is currently using TD version 5.1 and considering upgrade to TD 5.2 next year. We are developing a business software product, run against Oracle database. The application has more than 500 form windows and several hundred reports.

I think Team Developer scales well to both simple small applications, and larger enterprise application suites with big RDBMS and hundreds of users.

The code outline makes the IDE easy to approach and I think the learning curve will not be that steep. The code editing is possible even without mouse, since there is a number of handy keyboard shortcuts. Of course the window designer needs mouse. There is also a built-in Active Coding Assistant in the newer releases.

The newest releases (5.1 and 5.2) offer some new GUI controls, such as a date/time picker, a grid window (enhancement to the widely used table window) and Rich Text editor. There is also a new tab control. Menus can be shown ribbon-like, though this is not a "real" ribbon bar. Sample screenshots can be found on the Unify web site.

Also new GUI themes were introduced in the 5.x versions of TD, to provide a more modern look and feel for the applications.

There have been a number of stability issues, performance problems and problems with screen painting etc. with the 5.x versions of TD. The older 3.x and 4.x are known of very robust quality, having only a very limited number, if any, stability or other issues. These issues are discussed actively on the Unify Support Forum. Many of these issues are related to database routers (Oracle, MS SQL Server) or Windows API calls. The basic functionality of TD is usually working quite fine.

Also help on specific problems and questions can be reached on the Support Forum. The developer community is maybe small, but quite active.