> Well I suggest you read from those which arguable have done quite a
> bit for Eiffel in the past or even now. Then you might get an idea on
> what happened to them
>
> Especially look after feature requests and "the answers" of the
> vendors some years ago.... Then ask regular Eiffel users how they can
> treat existing code....
>
Friedrich,
I have been following the comp.lang.eiffel newsgroups for year. I
started
looking at eiffel back in 1995 when ISE and Tower were the two biggest
players. That does not mean, of course, that I developed using eiffel
for
anywhere near these past 12 years. In fact, I am now looking at
eiffel
for the first time as a development project. I'm sure if I had
started
developing with eiffel before now, I would be frustrated with some of
the
vendors (i.e., some of them for going out of business, some for not
implementing features, etc.). But this has happened in the mainstream
development world during this time period as well.
But, if I were to answer your question about which current vendor to
go
with, now that both SmartEiffel and ISE have GPL versions (although
ISE's
would be hard to use for a commercial product because you are supposed
to distribute the source code). My take on both versions is that you
should use the one that best fits your domain.
>From an embedded systems
point of view, I think SmartEiffel is better. That is, the code seems
to be smaller and faster than the ISE version although I will test
that
with my code in the future (like llothar, I plan to use mostly
"generic"
cl***** from the SmartEiffel library until I am convinced that the
libraries are stable). Also, it seems easier to ****t SmartEiffel
to new hardware. That is, you should be able to ****t it without
any of the SmartEiffel teams assistance, whereas ISE stated that
they could take a look at the platform and see if there run time
compiles on that platform. And, if you use the commercial license for
ISE, it
could get expensive to purchase a license for each new hardware
package you sup****t or develop for. SmartEiffel has also added a
growing list of libraries, but I have no idea how well they have
been tested by actual users.
Having said that, ISE has some strengths in large scale systems. I
have
trolled on the ISE mailing lists and people seem to be building such
types of systems. Of course, I have no idea how big they truly are,
but there are some hints in the mailing lists. The libraries are
well designed and are probably tested. Although it seems like some
people use GOBO as an alternative or in combination with ISE's
libraries.
So, the
ISE product has very good, well tested libraries. And of course,
the IDE has improved greatly since I started using EiffelCase in
95-96.
Finally, the students at Bertrand's university are doing some
interesting things with products like EiffelMedia and the
preliminary implementations of SCOOP.
Just my two cents. :-)
Lee
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