Forte's Life?

I don't have any links for you to follow, but I do have a copy of Sun's Statement of Direction document from May 2004. Here's the contents of the roadmap section:

UDS Roadmap Overview

In view of the customer trend toward J2EE, and the migration initiative outlined above, Sun has decided to place UDS in a sustaining mode. Overall, this sustaining status indicates Sun's intent to continue supporting the current product and customers for an extended period of time, while curtailing new investment in the product. Sun does not expect to develop any new features or functionality in UDS from this point forward.

Support Defined

Sun will provide support for UDS as outlined below.

"Limited Support" will consist of online and telephone support only. Bug fixes, patches, or any other kinds of product updates will not be available as part of Limited Support.

Remedial Support will include all the features of Limited Support, but will also include periodic bug fixes or patch releases as well as periodic service packs for UDS. Also, as part of Remedial Support, Sun will periodically test UDS with new releases of third party operating systems, databases, compilers, and other components, and update the UDS support matrix accordingly.

This limited testing and update of support matrices will typically occur once every 12 to 18 months, or as the need arises.

Support and Sustaining Engineering Services Timelines

The support period for UDS is as follows:

Operating SystemsEnd Date for Remedial SupportEnd Date for Limited Support

AIX, OS390, z/OS, HPUX, VMS, Tru64.October 2006October 2006

Solaris TM Operating System (SPARC Platform Edition)October 2008April 2009

Microsoft Windows, server side deploymentOctober 2006October 2006

Microsoft Windows, application development and client deployment only October 2008April 2009

DatabasesEnd Date for Remedial Support End Date for Limited Support

Informix, Sybase, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server October 2006October 2006

Oracle October 2008April 2009

In April 2009, UDS on will have officially reach End of Support Life on all platforms.

I'm not sure whether there are any later statements.

Is that what you were looking for?

MarkCarruthers at 2007-7-5 0:11:37 >

There was a project ... defunct now on how to make an open source Fort 4GL ... there are a couple of guys around that had access to source code ... may be they'll start something when Java 2EE is in no position to offer the same level of distribution, monitoring and management of partitions :o(

In my opinion SUN acquired Fort 4GL to pillage it in order to give some real EE dimension to J2EE ... coding in Java with the Fort middleware would have been a killer ... it looks like Sun never managed to or never wanted/bothered to use Java as a TOOL replacement

So I seriously doubt SUN will ever release the source code to the OpenCommunity even though being asked overly politely ... but as you I'm expecting. Just keeping a copy of the stuff in case reverse engineering and quantum computers crack the Fort Source code open ;o)

BBi at 2007-7-5 0:11:37 >

It's really great to see somebody still talking about Forte! We still run al lot of Forte code, and is in the process to convert it to Java(We're making use of a company that does the conversion for us, pretty much by rewriting every line of code). But it's a longggg and slow process.

In the mean time we need to go over to Oracle 10G - do any of you no how forte will handle such a change, since it's only certified for oracle 8?

Message was edited by:

3ng

3ng at 2007-7-5 0:11:37 >