History
The Informix-4GL project was started in 1985, with Chris Maloney as chief architect. Roy Harrington was in charge of the related Informix Turbo (later renamed Online) engine, which bypassed the "cooked" file system in favour of "raw" disk. A Rapid Application Development Tool called FourGen CASE Tools, was bundled with Informix-4GL from 1989 to 1996. Another flavor of Informix programming-tool was produced, called "New Era", which supported object-oriented programming and a level of code-compatibility with Informix-4GL.
Informix was acquired by IBM in April 2001.
Despite its age, Informix-4GL is still widely used to develop business applications, and a sizable market exists around it due to its popularity. With accounting being an inherently text based activity, it is often chosen for its purely text-based interface to optimize data entry efficiency. New accounting applications are still being developed with Informix-4GL for this reason, such as LOCbook which was released in 2010. The Eppix telecommunication accounting system uses IBM Tuxedo services written in the C Programming Language to call pre-compiled 4GL object modules dynamically at run-time.
Read more about this topic: IBM Informix-4GL
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