Oracle Corp is beginning to get its object tools strategy together and says it has sent its long-awaited ’round-trip’ Designer/2000 application modeling and design tool into beta testing, expecting general ships to begin at the beginning of next year. Although a new version of the Oracle relational database supporting extended data types has been shipping since the end of June, there are currently no Oracle tools which programmers can use to take advantage of the new features in new applications. The company scrapped an internal development project called Sedona that was to have provided tools written the Basic language in order to re-focus its efforts on creating Java language-based tools. The company will describe a complete set of tools products that will take advantage of Oracle 8 at its user conference later in September. The Designer/2000 2.0 CASE product goes part of the way to giving developers access to the new Oracle 8 features and fixes the shortcomings of previous releases. It includes a shared, multi-user repository and enables developers to model applications which can utilise Oracle 8 tables, VLDB very large database technology and new indexing schemas. An application is generated by feeding the model into version 2.0 of Oracle’s Developer/2000 engine due to ship at the end of September. Applications created using older versions of the tools products are difficult to modify, the company says, because changes had to be made to many instances of the application. Using Designer/2000 2.0, changes are made to the shared repository from which a new application can be generated. It means developers can reverse-engineer Developer/2000 applications so that all logic and event models can be stored in the repository. The first tools for creating C++ class libraries that can access and generate Oracle 8 data types and APIs will be the Oracle Object Database Designer (CI No 3,181), now expected early next year. OODB is one of the Sedona technologies Oracle has managed to salvage. It uses the Unified Modeling Language created by Rational Software Inc and others and includes the same repository as Designer/2000. However not until a future 2.x release will the Designer/2000 repository also support the OODB tools. In addition to Oracle databases, Designer/2000 tools can also be used to design applications for use with DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase SQL Server and also support the reverse engineering of Developer/2000 applications generated natively for those platforms. It also works other ODBC-and ANSI SQL DDL- compliant databases.
