I have question about moving from 8.2 to 8.5. I have 1 DateEase 8 Developer License and 25 group licenses. (this is for Mohawk Industries) I have held off upgrading until I thought that the platform was stable. My question is how do I upgrade the 25 users group? Is it now “Player”? are all of the functions from the current release of 8.5 available in Player?

Hi Edward.

There is no difference between Player and Developer function wise.
Player is a pure run-time environment, so everything you have developed in the Developer you can use in Player.

It also supports "Runtime Development" features like ExecDQL, HTMLEditor etc, so if the developer has made these features available to users they can use them.

The split in Developer and Player (Runtime) is really in its infancy. 

It is not secret that many customers used Developer (Full) to run applications as it was deemed more convenient and as a result Developer suffered as a Developer environment because of Runtime security etc.

Runtime/Exec/Group etc was also seen as inferior client software as it was just a cut-down version of the Developer.

This split is to improve both worlds. Developer for Developers so we can include development support, application deployment and maintenance in the package.

In the Runtime/Player world we are developing several lines:

The Player as it is now, which is the Full Runtime environment as we are used to.

Distribution Kit - which is basically a way of packaging applications and distribute them without the need for a seperate DataEase instalaltion.

Own Branding/Co-Licensing - Where partners sell a product rather than a DataEase license.

As there are 26 computers involved in this upgrade, is the DataEase develop team at a point that it make sense to spend the time upgrading. Or are we going to see further quick updates? Reason I ask is that I would like the use some of the new tools that DE8.5 is providing but can wait if more are coming.

When will the Distribution Kit be available and what will it cost. This seems to be a great Idea. What is the business model?

We plan to finalise DE85 development this autumn and then it will enter full release mode and after that we will only do bug fixing rather than functional improvements, so if you are looking for a logical point to wait for that would possibly be it.

We are also working on server install with automatic workstation deployment and updating but at this time we are not sure if that will be part of 8.5.

If you have tested LegEasy4DOS Professional you will have seen that it checks the version and update automatically if your version is too old. This would of course help a lot in DE85 too.

The distribution kit will be part of the Application Developer Partner Kit and not a product sold directly to customers.

The pricing structure for Application Developers is a program we call co-licensing where they can sell their applications at any price they like ad pay us 35% of the resale price as a license.

So if a partner sell their application for £1 we will charge them 35p. 

Licensing of DataEase and DataEase derrived application will be much more tailor-made in the future as our goal is to get much more vertical development based on DataEase technology.