Sybase Inc’s tools division, Powersoft Corp, will announce distributed Unix and Windows NT server versions of its PowerBuilder front-end development system at its user group conference in Orlando, Florida this week. It will unveil new tools in the PowerBuilder line there too, as well as S/Designor for PowerBuilder, its new data modelling tool taken from the acquisition of SDP SA, Suresnes, France in April. S/Designor has been integrated with a PowerBuilder 4.2 release such that it incorporates PowerBuilder characteristics including the look and feel and data documentation features. S/Designor for PowerBuilder will be sold exclusively by PowerSoft; the stand-alone version will be sold by SDP. The SDP acquisition also provides Sybase with a much-needed software engineering tool to compete against Oracle Corp’s Developer and Designer/2000 offerings. However, calling the thing Designor might be a way of throwing up some chaff against Oracle, but it is also destined to confuse the heck out of people too. PowerSoft, which has shipped a Motif client version of PowerBuilder since December, will unveil Distributed PowerBuilder for Unix and Windows NT. The client-server edition effectively raises Powersoft another notch in the application development environment market, where it will now compete with the likes of Informix Corp, Learmonth & Burchett Management Systems Plc, Cognos Inc, Progress Software Corp, Computer Associates International Inc and Uniface Holding BV. Distributed PowerBuilder includes application partitioning, which Powersoft describes as the ability to distribute and process PowerBuilder objects across clients and servers. Powersoft will also reveal plans to build an object repository that will merge its products together. The repository will comprise core technology from Sybase’s now defunct object-oriented EnterpriseMomentum project along with technologies taken from internal projects and third parties. A set of Sybase-PowerBuilder-SDP-specific class libraries are also being developed that will be bundled with new versions of PowerBuilder. It has not decided whether it will make or buy the systems management, scheduling and software distribution components it still requires for PowerBuilder.
