DISTRIBUTED THINKING
BY STEWART ALSOP
Power Objects: a dream come true for Dweebs, Geeks, and Weenies?
Oracle shipped Workgroup/2000, including Power Objects, last week. This is major news, huh? Actually not. The company has been giving away free copies of the software on CD-ROM and the Internet during its "extended" beta test during the past six months. But it is a pretty interesting event because it marks an attempt by one of the major players in corporate computing systems to become a player in the rapid (or at least the quick) development of key applications. That leads to the basic question: Can Oracle, an aggressive multibillion dollar software company that is just as competitive as Microsoft -- come late to the game of client/server applications development and make headway against Microsoft and Sybase (really, its subsidiary Powersoft), the two main targets of opportunity?
Right now, developers have organized themselves into three groups using one of three basic sets of tools to develop custom applications for internal use.
Data Dweebs: These are the database people who have adopted Sybase's PowerBuilder, the first tool to be adopted in a really big way for applications development, or Gupta's SQL Windows, which came first but has fallen behind. These are real systems people and may have even been trained to run reliable, safe, functional computer systems. They worry about boring concepts such as data integrity, scalability, and system security. They think PowerBuilder is sexy.
VB Geeks: Microsoft's Visual Basic is considered the challenger to PowerBuilder, because it is the core of a broad set of tools, including Microsoft Access, Visual C++, Microsoft Office, and interfaces such as VBA, OLE, and OCX , and third-party components.
Borland's Delphi is cool, but everybody wonders about Borland; besides, the product is based on Pascal, so it couldn't be mainstream, right? Symantec is doing a great job of building out a set of tools around its thing, the name of which I can never remember, you know what I mean? But Visual Basic is really accessible to people. You can kind of pick it up and pretty soon, gol darnit, you're making pretty heavyweight applications. Its power is in not having to be a professional when you start and looking like you know what you're doing when you're finished.
Object Weenies: These dreamers keep looking for a way to use real objects. We're talking serious stuff -- dynamic binding, polymorphism, real reusability, the whole kit and caboodle. The largest noticeable group has bought in to the most recent version of Steve Jobs' vision and is using Next's OpenStep, now available on NextStep on Intel, Solaris on Sparc and Intel, and on HP-UX and due to be available on Windows NT soon. Eventually Taligent will deliver enough software that someone will take it seriously, but OpenStep is the only viable, object-oriented development system. That is both the saving of Steve Jobs (Next is now making money for the first time) and his biggest problem: The whole system is based on Objective C and requires too much of a leap of faith for "real" programmers.
Oracle hasn't been a player in client/server application tools, which really irritates and worries the company. Without a position in key client/server tools, Oracle could lose its leadership position in database management and custom applications. (You know, when mainframes die off completely and PCs are the only thing left, just like I've been saying all along.) To its credit, Oracle has devised and implemented a strategy that needs to be taken seriously because of Oracle's size and because of the strategy itself. Also to its credit, Oracle has moved quickly, developing an entire set of tools with real credibility in less than two years.
So why would anybody want to buy it? It works. It's really cross-platform -- Windows, Macintosh, and OS/2. (Unix is dead, right?) It's free to try. It's relatively cheap to buy. (And you get hundreds of megabytes of software, too!) It's object oriented, but lets real programmers use real tools. (What's life without a run-time environment?)
These things are all cool and true and somewhat relevant. But the thing that Oracle is just on the edge of getting that will put Power Objects out front is how it deals with the Internet. What if Power Objects made it simple to develop applications that worked equally and scaled well on either internal networks (the Ethernet) or external networks (the Internet)? What if you could get what the Data Dweebs treasure with the flexibility that the VB Geeks love and the reusability that the Object Weenies love -- and, on top of all that, you could treat the Internet as a natural extension of your corporate network? Cool.
Write to Stewart Alsop at stewart_alsop@infoworld.com.
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