Oracle Corp this week launched its Co-operative Development Environment, CDE, an integrated set of tools designed to enable organisations to create, deploy and maintain client-server applications. Applications built with it will be portable across different graphical user interfaces and automatically run under Microsoft Corp’s Windows, the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh, OSF/Motif and other environments without changing any of the code, Oracle claims, automatically conforming to the native look-and-feel of each graphical environment in which it is run. This is achieved via a software library called the Adaptable User Interface Toolkit, which enables the same version of the tool to run under Windows, Macintosh System, Open Look and Motif. Co-operative Development Environment applications incorporate multimedia objects – image, sound and video, and these are also portable between environments, and they can access data stored in most databases, including DB2 and SQL Server as well as Oracle7 databases. They are created diagrammatically using high-level software engineering modelling tools, and the environment can interoperate with other tools, such as Texas Instruments Inc’s IEF and KnowledgeWare Inc’s IEW, by exchanging model information stored in the CDE Repository with models stored in their repositories. Co-operative Development Environment is built using application programming interfaces such as Open Data Base Connectivity and Distributed Rrelational Database Architecture. Oracle notes that its $1,200m turnover for fiscal 1992 included $240m in tools sales, making it the leading independent vendor of application development tools, and Oracle claims that Co-operative Development Environment coupled with the Oracle7 Co-operative Server Database enables its installed base to upgrade existing applications to a graphical client-server environment. The Environment comprises three classes of tools – system modelling, application building, and end-user. The first and third are out now, and all components will be available by June; no firm price.
