DBMS, June 1996
For over a month, I have been struggling with the problem of which development environment to go with. I narrowed my search to Visual Basic, Delphi, and Oracle Power Objects. After reading your April article "Battle of the Visual Masters," I was able to make my decision with confidence. My decision was to go with Oracle Power Objects. Thanks for a well-written article. I hope to see more.
Donald W. Hornbrook
Sysone@cswnet.com
I just finished reading David Linthicum's article, "Battle of the Visual Masters," in the April issue of DBMS (page 91). I thought he did a great job of comparing/contrasting the three development tools. The one question I have is why he didn't include PowerBuilder in the discussion? Do you expect the other tools to wash out PowerBuilder?
Susan Detwiler
104167.3250@compuserve.com
I enjoyed your article comparing Delphi, VB, and Power Objects in the April 1996 issue of DBMS. I am currently in the process of evaluating what product to use for database development projects we have on the table.
Is there any reason that you didn't include PowerBuilder in your article? That is actually the product I am leaning towards using. What are your thoughts on PowerBuilder? It seems to be a better product than those you reviewed.
Chuck Davis
Systems Analyst, 3M
cadavis@mmm.com
We received several messages asking why PowerBuilder was not included in April's comparison article "Battle of the Visual Masters." I now realize we should have included it, but let me explain some reasons why we focused on Visual Basic, Delphi, and Oracle Power Objects. PowerBuilder was designed specifically as a tool to build client/server database applications (and DBMS has consistently and extensively covered PowerBuilder since its first release). Visual Basic and Delphi (which is based on Pascal) are different because they are general-purpose development tools that are often used to build database applications. Visual Basic did not gain serious database features until version 3.0, but Delphi 1.0 had database features to start with. Oracle Power Objects is a new database development tool with a Basic language at heart. So all three products are essentially programming languages adapted to database development. Perhaps this point was not made clear enough. In addition, PowerBuilder 5.0 was not yet ready for consideration when this article was written, but David Linthicum will review the new version of PowerBuilder in an upcoming column.
-- Ed.