Oracle sets its sights on Visual Basic faithful—
Software generates code for Microsoft tool;
new distributed functions on tap

Oracle Corp. this month will launch its second major attempt to capitalize on Microsoft Corp.'s popular Visual Basic with an application-design tool that can be used with Visual Basic to build high-end applications.

Oracle's Designer/2000 Release 1.2 will enable developers using Visual Basic to build more-sophisticated, robust applications. Designer/2000 is a computer-aided software engineering tool for modeling the business functions that underlie an application. It is used to design an application before actually building it and will ship by the end of the month.

Enabling developers to generate Visual Basic code would expand the market for Designer/2000 developers beyond those working with Oracle's own Developer/2000 graphical development suite.

To date, developers using Designer/2000 could only generate Developer/2000 code.

"Oracle is really trying to put legs under the good words people have been speaking for a long time about portability" of code between platforms and development environments, said Dale Lowery, principal in the Washington-based Oracle development firm, CASEtech Inc.

To make use of this functionality, developers will choose a Designer/2000 menu option for generating Visual Basic code. They then will enter the business rules and other information governing the application's design, and Designer/2000 will generate Visual Basic code, said Dennis Moore, vice president of product marketing at Oracle, based here [Redwood Shores, CA].

Oracle developed this functionality internally, using interfaces published by Microsoft for writing Visual Basic file structures from other development tools, Moore said.

In addition, version 1.3 of Designer/2000 that is Windows 95 logo-compliant and supports generation of code for the forthcoming Visual Basic 4 will ship in December, he said.

In the first quarter of next year, Oracle also will support code generation for its own Power Objects development tool, as well as class libraries, or chunks of code, for the object-oriented C++ language. These capabilities will be delivered in Designer/2000 1.4. The object traits of Power Objects and C++ will ensure that code generated in Designer/2000 can be reused.

C++ developers, in particular, may benefit from this functionality. "C++ can create fast-executing programs, but there's no way to make a very complex program because you have to manually coordinate what multiple people do, and there's no repository support," Moore said.

In a related development, Oracle is expected to disclose at its users' conference in late September that the next major release of Developer/2000, slated to ship next summer, will give developers the ability to debug applications on a distributed basis.

This will allow a software object on a remote computer to be debugged from within Developer/2000 without requiring Developer/2000 to be running at the remote location, according to a source familiar with the plans. The move will extend the product's current functionality.