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Reviews - Sterling Commerce
I am Mike Zander, a Lead Software Engineer at Sterling Commerce in Dallas, Texas. I have been developing IBM mainframe system software for over 30 years, and have used XDC (and now XDC/SE) for the last 12 years. I whole-heartedly endorse these products.
My company, Sterling Commerce, Inc., is the world's leading provider of end-to-end E-business solutions based on Internet technology. Our mission is to help companies capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities for growth and profitability brought about by the Internet and supporting technologies. The products that I enhance and help maintain are "industrial strength" advanced file transfer systems. They are multi-tasked, with multi-address interfaces and asynchronous events. In a word, complex!
Using XDC/SE's Cross Domain Facility, Sterling Commerce has been able to deliver a high-quality software product - allowing us to enjoy worldwide leadership in the advanced file transfer market. This interactive tool allows a developer to walk through the code and identify potential problems.
XDC/SE is a very mature, well behaved product; easy to learn, and easy to use. Even though I've used the product for years, it seems that every time I look something up, using the online help, I discover something new about an XDC/SE feature. It may be as simple as setting a color, as powerful as displaying the data in ASCII format, or splitting the screen to create a watch window. The product and its usage are feature rich.
XDC/SE is truly a powerful debugging tool. I don't know how I would have found some problems without XDC/SE. But, it doesn't stop there. I use XDC/SE in unit testing to verify that my programs execute the logic path that I intended. We should code for exceptions, but in a perfect world that code is never executed. So, how do I test the exception logic? I use XDC/SE to force that code path. If my code needs to call an interface that has not been written yet, I can even use XDC/SE as a "program stub", simulating the interface. And the list goes on.
For me, XDC/SE is more than a powerful debugging tool, it is also a development tool that allows me to write programs that are more accurate, complete, and with fewer defects.
I have interfaced with many software companies and their products over the last 30+ years. Cole Software (David Cole and Bob Shimizu) and their product XDC/SE are the best of breed.
Mike Zander - mike_zander@stercomm.com