Visual LANSA Forum

2016 is the year that the experts, pundits, and pollsters got it all so wrong.

But…where else can we all turn for good advice in 2017? How about our peers and community groups like the G2 Crowd?

Visual LANSA is recognised as a ‘High Performer’ on The Grid for Integrated Development Environments: https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/inte ... onment-ide

“High Performers provide products that are highly rated by their users, but have not yet achieved the market share and scale of the vendors in the Leader category.”

We would appreciate your help to boost our share of voice in 2017 by adding your review and rating to this community website. LANSA currently enjoys the highest score of any IDE vendor..vote with your fingers if you agree!

We know that Visual LANSA is not the most obvious choice or famous name out there...but we also know how fanatically productive and loyal our users are and we thank you for your unwavering commitment and support. Visual LANSA v14 is the culmination of a lot of vision and hard work and we hope that, as a community, you feel sufficiently rewarded for both your loyalty and maintenance dollars.

I am a little confused on what you are asking.
Are you asking why it is rated so highly or are you asking to vote for it in G2Crowd?

I think the market share issue is that most think that LANSA is for shops with IBM systems. If you are targeting developers in the .NET, Java, NodeJS, Ruby etc. space there are some things I think LANSA could do better.

The first thing to understand is that a lot those developers don't just code at work. They code at home and when traveling. Not to say that we (LANSA developers), don't but the mainstream programmers have access to the same tools at home as they do at work. Visual Studio Community is free and with 2017, it may finally drive developers away from Resharper. JetBrains has great tools for a low cost and there are great tools for Java, Ruby and Node that are free. I don't know of anyone that has an install of LANSA on their home box. Making the dev environment available on AWS and Azure is great step in the right direction as it does give us access to the tools. The cost I think can be justified as the tool is doing A LOT of heavy lifting for you.

What prevents me from using it home however is that I cannot deploy what I make without significant cost. $2k year is to much IMHO for the scalable license. If I was able to afford it, the cost prevents me from scaling. I understand paying for the development environment, but don't make me pay for the runtime or inhibit me from scaling. When a .NET, Java, Node programmer deploys an app to AWS, Azure, Heroku or whatever, it is costing them a few dollars a month. Of all the tools mentioned above, none of them come with runtime licenses that cost me deploy an application I have made.

If you want to get the word out about LANSA, make it as easy and cheaply as possible for single developers to get apps out in the wild.

The other thing is that the tool still needs some work. I did not use it before V14 so I don't know how much better it is now then in the past and I can only compare it to the other tools I have worked with like Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.

One of the bigger pain points for me is the debugger. These other tools have phenomenal debuggers that let you get really deep and they are very fast. I have spent numerous minutes hitting the debugger and waiting and waiting and waiting. I've gotten to the point where I don't even try to debug anymore, I just trace the hell out of everything.

That is just the one thing that is "grinding my gears" of late, I won't turn this complaint section, but please just keep improving the environment.

When I tell people about LANSA, I often say that it makes the hard things incredibly easy and the easy things incredibly hard. Things like data access, UI, etc have become really easy. Integrating with other apps (becoming more and more important) is incredibly difficult.

Anyway, there is more I want to say, but this has already become way too long.

Hope this helps,
Joe

I thought the debugger sluggishness was because of my slow T1 connection. Hopefully it will get better.