Oracle Corp yesterday responded to Sybase Inc’s acquisition of Powersoft Corp by addressing complaints that its Co-operative Development Environment 2 was too complicated and expensive by pulling it apart to create two separate client-server development tools that it believes will deliver a knock-out blow to the competition, including Sybase. The company claims that the new Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 are the first to bring high-end programming features to Windows developers. They include application partitioning and business process re-engineering features, and Oracle claims they overcome what it says is a weakness of Sybase’s PowerBuilder 4.0, that it is limited in the number of users it can support. It also claims first-generation tools fail to take advantage of the programmable features found in server databases such as Oracle7, and require excessive coding to create powerful applications. The new Developer/2000 is claimed to build on Oracle’s existing forms, graphics and report technology to enable users to apply drag-and-drop application partitioning, automated software distribution, and full support for Microsoft Copr’s Object Linking & Embedding 2.0 to create applications for anything from workgroups to several thousand concurrent users. Designer/2000 is claimed to be the lowest- priced application design system on the market, and to include support for system analysis, software design, code generation and business process re-engineering. Available April 1, Developer/2000 is $4,000 per developer with free runtime licences for deployment under Windows; Motif, Macintosh, and character- mode versions are planned for later this year. Designer/2000 costs $4,000 and will be generally available for Windows next month.
