Another company is claiming the ability to offer practical object-oriented development for mainstream management information system application projects. Powersoft Inc has launched PowerBuilder 2.0 as a client-server tool for large scale development in teams. In the UK the main distributor for PowerBuilder is Admiral Plc’s Admiral Software of Camberley, Surrey. It has been distributing PowerBuilder 1.0 in the UK for the past six months and claims almost 100 companies are using the product with evaluation, including names like J P Morgan, Warner Brothers and British Telecommunications Plc. Version 2.0 ships on June 1 and an upgrade path is being offered from one version to the other. Some have dismissed the tool as frontware, a tag Terence Rollo vehemently and emphatically denies. His definition of client-server computing is the division of an application between presentation on the client and and data handling on the server. PowerBuilder is a specialised front-end processor and it enables the developer to build an application and route data to different databases at the back end as well as offload some processing from them. It currently supports DB2, SQL/Server, Oracle 4.2, SQLBase, AllBase and XDB – the last of these is a personal relational database popular in the US that runs on, say, a notebook and has built-in compatibility with DB2. The reason that AllBase is supported (not an obvious top priority database to support in this market) is because PowerSoft was a large reseller of Hewlett-Packard Co kit in a previous incarnation. PowerBuilder runs under Windows 3.0 and 3.1 and target applications are for Windows 3.0 and 3.1. Despite the fact that the product’s targeted market is large companies, Rollo does not think that only having a Windows version is a problem. He believes this predominantly IBM market is changing and is now beginning to consider Windows vis-a-vis OS/2. So what features does the tool offer? The company has broken them down into slick marketing slogans: Object Easy, SQL Smart, Windows Rich and MIS Friendly. PowerBuilder is built round an object-oriented architecture and supports inheritance, encapsulation and the re-use of objects without the developer being required to learn an object-oriented high-level language. The product now supports dynamic SQL as well as static SQL, and can handle binary large objects for each database. The company has also developed a special SQL-expert object for presenting and manipulating database information. Called Dynamic DataWindows, it enables developers to create and modify windows presenting database information at run time. PowerBuilder 2.0 now includes support for Object Linking and Embedding, multiple document interface, drag and drop objects, and TrueType. The main justification for the phrase MIS Friendly lies in PowerBuilder 2.0’s object library with a check-in-check-out system. Using this library, developers can define custom objects and use them along with the standard objects that come with 50 or so windows provided with the tool. The library can be network-based or kept locally – libraries are independent files within MS-DOS and there can be multiple libraries per project as well as generic libraries across applications. The system administrator can lock and unlock objects so that programmers do not overwrite each other’s work. The debugger has been enhanced so that data can be modified at run time. The product can support late binding in Windows via the Dynamic Link Library or early binding at .EXE level in MS-DOS. In the UK PowerBuilder 1.0 pricing ranges from UKP1,990 for a single user copy to UKP3,200 for a premium copy supporting DB2. Training and consultancy from Admiral is extra and pricing for version 2.0 has not yet been set. – Katy Ring
