goldcougar:
Servoy is about RAD. As with most RAD tools, the deployment frameworks are chosen for you by the RAD tool. Folks that know enough to write their own custom front-ends in the latest/coolest frameworks aren’t really Servoy’s target customer. There are few that would really use it. So, yes, it would be cool, but at what cost, and who would really use it?
I agree with the RAD part. But in your history lesson, you completely missed a very important dynamic change: there used to be a huge gap between the RAD/4GL tools and — for lack of a better characterization — “traditional” programming. Personal example: I went directly from a job doing COBOL/JCL on 360’s to a many multi-million $$ company running entirely on FilemakerPro apps the owner had built entirely on his own — a salesman who didn’t graduate high school.
Browser development has narrowed this gap between RAD/4GL and “traditional” down to a few extra days of study instead of an entire college degree (ex: Meteor). In a couple of years, even this gap will be gone (ex: Jetbrains IDE Meteor integration, MS .Net tools, Telerik App Builder) — browser development is the new 4GL.
goldcougar:
As an ISV, Servoy is future-proofing for you. You only had to build your app once, and Servoy made it work as new technologies came out. Not a lot of tools have successfully pulled that off, but Servoy, to their credit, has done a great job of that!
I very much don’t agree with this. Browser development has exploded in the last five years and the next two years will make the last five look like a small blip — Servoy’s NG Client is already well behind the curve. I would describe it more as a not-easily-hackable impossible-to-tune not-close-to-being-polished RAD tool based on obsolete technology. “Over engineered” comes to mind.
As a RAD tool though, NG Client provides one important leverage point. But it needs the 2nd leverage point I outlined above to really be future proof.
People choose tools like Servoy because of the RAD aspect. They leave these tools because of their limitations. NG Client by itself has a lot of limitations.