One of our hidden jewels is NetPlus.  It’s been part of the Sapphire family of products for over 10 years playing a key role in a number of mission critical solutions we have delivered to our clients.

NetPlus isn’t an end-users tool – it’s really meant for the developer to develop applications.  But how many applications are really developed with the intention that the end-user will take them over and maintain them?  Not many.

From a developer’s point of view it fills a gap between DataEase and traditional programming languages such as VB and C# – it contains much of the simplicity of DataEase whilst opening up access to much more of the User Interface object model than DataEase.  This allows us the best of both worlds – we can build forms quickly and at the same time we can design them to work just the way the user needs.

Let’s look at some examples:  To build a form in DataEase you press “New”, specify the name of the table you want to build the form over and then enter some labels and drag some fields onto the form.   To build a form in NetPlus you press “New”, specify the name of the entity you want to build the form over and then enter some labels and drag some fields onto the form. Just the same!!  However, with NetPlus you can do much more to improve the user experience (something to talk about another day) – the ability to use modal forms, which force the user to complete the form before moving on is just one.

Scalescript is at the core of NetPlus and opens up access to all the properties on the form so you can customise behaviour to a far greater extent than you can in DataEase.

Fine, but in that case, why not write it in .Net?  True, this will give you even more scope to customise its behaviour, but then you can’t just build a form and connect it to a database – you’ll need to set up some sort of session manager to manage the transactions, then you’ll need to build a datalayer and business object layer to provide maintainable access to the data – then you can start to build your forms.

NetPlus requires a separate database engine.  In the past client / server developement was seen as complex and expensive – using big corporate systems such as Oracle or SQL Server. They needed heavyweight kit to run on and a dedicated database administrator to keep them running.

But this is no longer true – In both of these examples, there are free “Express” versions that are suitable for most applications and the day to day management of these products has been simplified to such an extent that setting up NetPlus and (say) SQL Server requires no more skill than setting up DataEase on a fileserver.  Programming knowledge has moved on,  and finding developers with SQL skills is now commonplace.

So when wouldn’t I use NetPlus?  Pretty much the only reason I’d opt for DataEase is when the user requires access to the source code.  Unlike DataEase a NetPlus application is a compiled executable so isn’t maintainable without the developement environment and repository.

Chris Gadsby