New Informix related software

IBM took the opportunity of having lots of customers and partners in the Information On Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas to make some important software announcements related to Informix:

• IDS 11 Developer Edition
  This will be an IDS release, oriented for software developers and with a few limitations.
  This edition will be available free of charge, but for development purposes only. It won't be usable for commercial purposes. The limits announced are reasonable for it's intended purpose: 1GB of memory, 8GB of data, 1 CPUVP (I'd change this one) and 20 concurrent sessions. There is also a new site dedicated to development using IDS:
  http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/ad/
  The downloads should be available around November 5th.
  
• IDS for MacOS
  There was also an announcement of a port of IDS to Apple's OS. MacOS is a favorite platform for many people (specially in the US). I believe the fact that you can run MacOS, Windows and Linux natively in the same hardware box turns it into an appealing tool to a lot of people (specifically students, geeks and other kinds of computer related persons). They also look cool, and have a reputation of being robust machines.
  All this have probably influenced IBM, and there are plans for a MacOS Developer Edition port
• Data Studio
  This is another IBM tool based around the Eclipse framework designed for DBAs and application developers. It's an ambitious project that wants to facilitate the development of Java applications, XML and Web Services related to database applications and SQL development. It supports all the relational databases from IBM (Cloudscape/Derby, DB2 LUW, DB2 i5/OS, DB2 Z/OS and Informix). You'll have more features available if you use DRDA connections introduced in Informix in version 11. The best way to understand this is to look at it's Web page ( http://www.ibm.com/software/data/studio/ ) and give it a try. You can find it's download link on the mentioned page.

You can see more on these topics in Guy Bowerman's Blog, more specifically in here
I wish you a lot of free time to enjoy this new software releases, especially if you're a developer and use, or would like to use IBM Informix Dynamic Server.