Hi

I am a system administrator of a small organization and our company is now going into a business with ATM Switches. The software runs on an AIX Server i.e. an IBM P-series server.

Well the requirements of this server are Oracle, Visual Age C++ and AIX version 5. Now this is the Bank's requirements where the switch is going to be located.

Our developers need to do development to do the interfacing as per the Bank's requirements and it will be done in Visual Age C++.

My primary concern for this issue is that if the gcc can do the same job on a X-86 based machine and my company does not require to incurr the cost of buying the P-series as well as the cost of the Overheads only needed for development testing.

I may sound foolish but frankly I have no idea about Visual Age C++ and infact I do not even use gcc either. I just know about gcc as being the standard compiler on my redhat based system.

Please advice. I dont think that its worth spending for a P-series server for this small development of interfaces.

Kindly advice and if any other alternatives then please do advice me as we are also going to recruit some C programmers for the same.

Thanks a ton.

Regards

Jimmax777

I've never heard of Visual Age C++, is it just a c++ compiler?
If so, then I so no reason that the free g++ wouldn't work in it's place.
Unless Visual Age has a particular feature you need that g++ doesn't.

Visual Age C++ is IBM's brand name compiler/development environment.

Gcc will compile and run just fine under AIX. With the appropriate libraries (Xlib, Gtk+, whatever) you can successfully do either command line or GUI programming in Gcc for AIX. Provided you have matching libraries and compiler versions, the Gcc coding you do under Linux should be portable to gcc under AIX.

HOWEVER...

It sounds like ATM switches has a requirement that development be done using Visual Age C++. There could be many completely legitimate reasons for this requirement.

If it is indeed a requirement - you're stuck.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

It seems to me that it would be pretty hard to justify the potential added expense of not using the compiler recommended by the vendor. Even if gcc could do the job just as well (as it probably could), the personnel costs of "futzing with it" could add-up pretty darned quickly. And, like a bad episode of Mission: Impossible, the vendor might "disavow all knowledge" of whatever problems you might currently be having.

You need to factor the costs of the development equipment into the contract. (If your salesman didn't consider that, you might be obliged to re-negotiate the contract.) Whatever deliverable the bank may require from you, they probably expect to be developed and delivered in the "approved" configuration. The fact that you might have overlooked a hidden cost is bad, but the eleventh-hour consequences of trying to deliver and install a system that was prepared without it may be far worse. When the time comes to collect that final check, you want to be able to actually keep it...

Just a few words: Visual Age is quite unique in the
way you program ... if you're familiar with Delphi and
love the drag and drop approach, and the typing in of
functionality - you ain't seen nothing yet :) ... VA (C++,
smalltalk, ...) will allow you to also use a graphical
"connector" to describe the methods & properties which
relate to graphical and non-graphical parts of your
program, it's like using varied UML layers to actually
code. And it uses its own class-library, the IUICL.

There's no way (at least none cheaper than buying an
OpenPower 2-way CPU and the compiler) to implement
those functionalities with GCC.

Another word: I haven't used VA since version 3.0 in
the days of OS/2, I assume that things may have changed.
But developing banking applications with it was a breeze,
it had the connectors for the DB2/UDB databases (native, not
ODBC), and was easily integrated with the BNM class-libraries,
and abstraction layer to talk to ATMs and CSPs.


Cheers,
Tink

Interesting. I've only used it as "the IBM compiler for AIX" - I had no idea about the advanced features tinkster is talking about. Cool!

PS:
I completely agree with sundialsvcs: the potential risks far outweigh any perceived "savings". Talk frankly with your vendor!

Hey friends.

Thanks a lot for the help. I know exactly what I need to talk to my vendors as well as my management. Its just because I am not a programmer and I do not really know much about this VA C++, that I needed this help.

Enjoy coding and freaking.

jimmax777

When working with banks there is one thing you'll find out quickly. They love IBM hardware. One of our products runs on both AIX and Windows and though the AIX solution (hardware and IBM maintenance) can be 10x or more the cost, most of the banks still choose IBM.

When compared to the VS .NET compiler, VACPP is very strict. While VisualStudio lets you get away with murder, casts everyting to anything for you, VisualAge does not. You'll also notice that compiles on even bleeding edge RS6000s is very s.l.o.w. Our 4way 6000 (using all 4 CPUs) takes over 5 hours to compile our source, while a single 3ghz p4 does it in about 4 hours.

Over the years I have found about 5 bugs in the VACPP compiler most of which were related to templates. Two they fixed in under a month and the others I found workarounds.

You will not be able to dodge these requirements.

In addition to what the previous posters said it is also likely that the binary interface between C++ object files/library is different between gcc and IBM's c++ compiler so you can't like to the libraries they require.

The legal situation is also clear and I can assure you a bank insists on this stuff.