It should be no surprise that AppStudio has been functionally stabilized in favor of promoting Designer and Cloud solutions. AppStudio has several integration points where it invokes WebFOCUS web tools like InfoAssist, Schedule tool, Security Center and others. Since all these can be accessed directly in the browser of your choice, we are interested in your feedback regarding if we were to remove those integration points and you needed to use the browser directly for those functions. Remember though that you would you use the browser of your choice: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc., instead of being forced into an Internet Explorer window or AppStudio created Internet Explorer tab.

Thank you for your feedback.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FP Mod Chuck,

From my perspective InfoAssist, Schedule tool and Security Center were always accessed from the browser.

I do hope that all the functionality in App Studio will be available in Designer, etc.

But fear that it will not.


[Perspective of an old programmer]
Seems to me that there is a clear shift away from coding in favour of point and click. I can see the benefits and the detriments. In particular with fussy clients.

The Problem we see with browsers is that the browsers are updated frequently, where WeBFOCUS is updated a couple of times per year. App Studio is linked to the WF version so that's more stable.

At this moment I only use Appstudio for editing Masterfiles, so for me it would be OK to loose the web integrations.

Perspective of another old programmer. To put it bluntly, I NEVER use the GUI. Since the GUI made it appearance, other that to see a sample of the code generated, you could count on one hand the number of times I have used it. When I started with FOCUS back in 1985, one of the selling points was it was 10 time faster to code than COBOL. Well in my view, unless you are dealing with an extremely primitive and simple report, at best, using GUI takes 10 times longer than coding. Since 99.9% of what we do is Excel and our users are not allowed to generate reports (due to the complexity of the database) the GUI has no real use for us. As for Dev Studio vs App Studio, I still use Dev Studio. I don't like the App Studio interface even a little bit.

Oooohhhh... right! There's a GUI too! I completely forgot about that.

I do use some parts of it, I realize. The master file editor is convenient to use and the panels to import synonyms.

For reports, I have quick-menu'd the New File option, which allows me to 'Create new Text file', which in turn completely ignores the sluggish GUI stuff. Awesome, just how I like it, it gets work done.

I use the HTML Composer when I run into existing launch-pages that need some fixing, I sometimes even create some, but I often prefer hand-made HTML's (aided by some self-maintained javascript libraries; there are some bugs and I'm the only one here capable of maintaining them, so there are drawbacks) which I find to be rather quicker to create.
Being fluent in semantic HTML, CSS and Javascript is a huge help, of course. I know not everyone can boast those skills (although it's really not that hard).

Hmm... are there other GUI tools built-in? I can't think of any... :P

Regarding the integration points: I used those a couple of times while learning WebFOCUS, until I knew the URL's by heart. Learning which components (Reporting Server, WebFOCUS Client, ReportCaster, etc.) were in play and how they interacted took me a lot longer.