As Adonix is only really used for X3 and nothing else in the Sage family and Microsoft .NET is currently in wide use, it is recommended that Sage develop a .NET framework that would allow customers and resellers to build customizations for X3 that that could take advantage of this platform. Other Sage products such as Sage 100 and Sage 500 allow developers to use the .NET framework to build customizations.
by: Louis D. | over a year ago | Technical
Comments
Using our own proriary language allows us to limit the risk to our customers that comes from updates to other technologies, or discontinuing their support.
Sage ERP X3 supports integration through common technologies like web services that allows developers to create their solution on their own platform and share information with the ERP.
I understand that Sage purchased Adonix so they have a vested interest in seeing a return in that. However, one of the problems of having a proprietary language is few people know it so design/development costs tend to be more expensive than using common languages such as those available in .NET. (For example during the year 2000 situation COBAL programmers were being paid quite well to upgrade some of that code since COBAL was a dead language by that time and few people knew it at the time)
Another drawback of having a proprietary language is in most cases it is a step or two behind in current technologies in use today such as touch screens or using cloud applications. Also, being behind current technology updates does create the possibility of proprietary languages being open to security risks that other development platforms have already addressed or losing capabilities that have been replace by new techniques that could impact critical processes in software written in those languages.
Finally, the .NET Framework is simply that a framework, so why couldn't Sage build a .NET version of Adonix that can take advantage of this Framework? (There are .NET Versions of COBAL as well as other languages) Benefits of that are that updates to the operating system and framework would have little impact on the language itself. The language would be safe from security risks as it would always be current with the latest security patches applied to the system. Software could be written for both 64 and 32 bit machines. Finally an Adnonix .NET language could take advantage of full range of possibilities of the .NET Framework and the latest technologies such as WPF and touch screens to create robust modern interfaces for users.
Additionally, .NET is well documented and there is plenty of communities out there to support developers. X3 has none of this, there is no documentation on development, and no community to provide support.
Also Web Services are a joke, you still need to develop the service in X3, before you want present it to a .NET or Java application. Which means you might as well develop your customisation in X3 anyway.