To shore itself up against the onslaught of the application partitioning wannabes now peppering the market, Four Seasons Software BV is chopping its proprietary Supernova Enterprise language into four offerings. Supernova Desktop is designed for client application development. Supernova Classic is the standard database application development tool suite, with native database links. Supernova Server offers multi-user development, while Supernova Enterprise provides a mission critical component. Prices go from $1,000 to $5,000. The Bilthoven, Netherlands-based company, which has its US base in Edison, New Jersey, claims it has been offering application partitioning since 1991. In most cases, it argues, companies that claim to provide application partitioning have tools running on a personal computer client with SQL statements being executed by a distributed database on the server. This functionality – offered by the likes of Powersoft Corp, Oracle Corp and Cognos Inc – is nothing other than the use of SQL stored procedures, it said. Even those companies that Four Seasons regards as its closest competition, Dynasty Technologies Inc and Forte Software Inc, only provide static partitioning, claimed president, Jossi Gil. Partitioning applications on Forte or Dynasty requires advanced knowledge about where the different parts will run and then compiling the partitions to specific systems. If, at some later stage, application parts are required to run on different systems, or need to be changed, Forte and Dynasty systems require the user to recompile the parts and reinstall them on the client and target systems, he claimed. Four Seasons’ own dynamic partitioning means developers can run code on different systems without modification or recompilation, says Four Seasons’ Gil.
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