Use of Jade developer rights

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by Martin Connolly >> Fri, 20 Apr 2001 6:29:00 GMT

Every Jade Partner has purchased a number of Jade developer rights, at a significant investment.

Yet if you want to do maintenance on a site with only user rights, the database has to be shutdown and registrations have to be changed in single user mode etc

We contend that ownership of developer rights should allow us developer access to a site, even if the user has not purchased developer rights.

As the number of Partners and the number of insatalled asites frows, this will become an increasing burden for Partners and customers.

Has anybody else experienced problems in this?

Is there a consensus of feeling we can take to Jade to get a change in licencing access?

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by Carl Ranson >> Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:15:20 GMT

Yes, I've experienced this and I basically agree with you.

I think they should allow a licence scheme where you have a number of user licences AND a single developer licence (at the same cost).

I'm not prepared to guess how Jade feels about this....I would expect they would want to prevent the situation where the extra developer licence is used for any real development (quite understandable). Perhaps its a different licence option, say a "Maintenance" licence, that lets you do most development tasks, but only costs the same as a user licence.

Cheers,
CR

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by Marc Ward >> Fri, 27 Apr 2001 5:52:19 GMT

Yes, we have experienced quite a few problems with this.

On a rather large deployment of a mission critical application last year we were forced to go with the option of having the customer purchase a JADE developer licence just in case we needed to do maintenance on their system. Given the following

(1)We are in Japan and that the customer speaks no English
(2)We were asked to be the point of support rather than have the customer contact JADE direct. Despite this the customer has to pay JADE support fees if they want to "toe the JADE line".
(3)The customer did not want to purchase the developer licence, there being no training facilities available here.

having$B!!(Bto get the customer to purchase a JADE developer licence was an extremely difficult sell- which was not welcome given the amount of pressure that was on us to use Oracle.

As you point out, maintaining a site if the customer does not have a development licence is not easy. Given that in this particular instance it would have required us to shut down an application that runs all inventory and financial transactions for a rather major enterprise - the prospect of which was not exactly looked kindly on by the customer - we didn't have any option but to push them to buy an otherwise completely used JADE development licence

We are now in the process of developing more mission critical software which will be run on an ASP basis. Without some kind of maintenance licence we may be forced to purchase a development licence for every customer we sell to. Obviously this is NOT something we want to be doing; the ONLY effect it will have will be to actively reduce sales. I would be very happy to be part of any effort to get JADE to change their licencing policy- the maintenance licence Carl Ranson refers to bears looking at.

Marc Ward
Dot Shell Co. Limited
Shizuoka Ken
Japan.

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by Craig Shearer >> Sun, 29 Apr 2001 20:02:27 GMT

Hi Martin, Carl and Marc

While I can see your points, surely you wouldn't advocate doing work on a live system? What if you accidentally changed something that had major consequences? (or deliberately changed something that had unforseen consequences!) Where is testing in all of this before being deployed into production?

Anyway, I'm not sure you need to sell development licenses to customers - as far as I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong), you can install a full development version at a customer site, but their licence won't allow them to access the JADE development environment. When you do need to access it, you use jadreg.exe to change the licence to your own development licence, and then you're away. I have a batch script that uses jadregb.exe to change licence keys quickly.

I agree that this method does require that the system be shut down, but you'd want to take a backup before you did anything to the system wouldn't you, so you could restore it if it all went wrong. I think working on a live database is risky at the best of times, let alone while the system is actually running! Also, if the database is in production mode then some changes made don't take effect until the node restarts anyway.

Having said all of that, there are things you can build into your system that allows scripts to be run without having to deploy new methods. In all our systems, we have a form that allows us to enter and execute JADE code (using the JadeCompiler class). Most of the time, this, and a convenient means of inspecting the database, is all that is required for supporting a production environment.

Just my 2 cents...

Craig.

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by Carl Ranson >> Sun, 29 Apr 2001 22:26:17 GMT

.....this is your conscience speaking....

CR

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by Stephen Persson >> Tue, 1 May 2001 21:10:47 GMT

Where is this JadeComplier class?
We are on v5.1.08 and I can't find anything about it in the help.
Is it only in a later version?

Stephen

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by Craig Shearer >> Tue, 1 May 2001 22:48:13 GMT

It's an unsupported feature. Say no more

Craig.

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by Martin Connolly >> Wed, 2 May 2001 11:40:56 GMT

Hi Craig

I expected someone from Jade to make the points you made in your first reply - even if you take the approach of not operating on a live system, you still have to change registrations etc.

My point is that we have invested in a right that we cannot use at the time it is most needed.

We encountered this at Port of Tauranga - they HAD a development right for the Ports system, but we could not use it for TheHub, since it was on a different server - user not impressed!

In this case. they are a 'Cardinal' site and the issue was 'resolved'...


"Unsupported feature"? - need I say more - if it goes wrong on you, what help would you get?

Martin

PS - no one from Jade has commented on this?!?!?

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by Dean Cooper >> Wed, 2 May 2001 21:10:08 GMT

The use of the JadeCompiler class to execute transient methods is an undocumented (and hence unsupported) feature. However, in JADE 5.2, new published methods are available on the Process class allowing you to create, delete and execute transient methods. As well as being able to compile and execute a transient method in one operation, the new Process methods improve on the JadeCompiler mechanism by allowing you to create and compile a transient method independently (so you can hold a reference to it for future execution). You can also specify method parameters (including io parameters) and a return value.

Dean.

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by Don Rae >> Thu, 3 May 2001 5:04:49 GMT

In response to the posts in this thread, I would like to assure you all that we are listening and so thank you for this discussion on JADE licensing issues. We are very aware of the problems discussed and are including them in our ongoing review of JADE licensing.

In the interim, if you have any immediate issues that you would like to discuss further with JADE then please do not hesitate to contact your JADE Partner Manager, or JADE e-Commerce Account Manager. If you are not sure who to talk to, I am happy to field initial inquiries.

best regards

Don Rae
drae@discoverjade.com