Enterprising tools look beyond GUI - includes directory - Buyers Guide

Building client/server applications for the enterprise demands high-performance development tools. That means that developers need tools that provide them with greater strength and flexibility than GUI-centric tools provide. To perform successfully at the enterprise level, GUI builders have to share the development platform with features such as facilitated access to major databases and simplified programming of complex business rules.

"In the past, many developers selected tools based on their GUI-building capabilities. However, GUI-centric tools typically generate applications that don't run on servers; this makes it difficult to handle the performance levels needed by high-volume applications," said Gail Goodman, vice president of marketing at Progress Software Corp., Bedford, Mass.

Further, she said, "The data access methods [of GUI builders] aren't portable. Because GUI builders offer support of a DBMS in its native language, the resulting application is not database-independent. Moving to another database platform necessitates the rewriting of the database processes."

This leaves, many observers feel, a gaping hole waiting to be filled by high-end products. To date, no vendor has taken a leadership position in the high-end client/server tools marketplace. This allows GUI toolmakers to continue dominating the development tool space.

Division of Labor

Early planers in the fledgling high-end arena range from firms founded specifically to focus on this niche, to struggling mainframe-based Case software vendors, to computer makers like Digital Equipment Corp., Tandem Computers and Unisys Corp.

Of those developing high-end tools from scratch, a few show promise. One is Forte Software, Oakland, Calif., which, with the help of reseller DEC, is increasing its installed base. Another is Dynasty Technologies, Naperville, Ill., which has built an experienced management team, but began shipping products only this year.

As for those coming down from the mainframe, Sterling Software Inc., Dallas, has been forced to cut personnel from the acquired KnowledgeWare operation in Atlanta based on poor client/server tools sales. Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas, is hoping its agreement with Microsoft to develop a tools repository will help it gain a position in the high-end client/server tools arena. And Seer Technologies Inc., Cary, N.C., claims some early success with the client/server version of its Seer*HPS development software.

Meanwhile, Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa., invested $50 million early this year to acquire Dutch toolmaker Top Systems and establish USoft, a wholly owned unit based in Brisbane, Calif. And DEC and Tandem have signed agreements to resell high-end tools from Forte and Seer, respectively.

In spite of all the activity, growth in this sector has been lackluster. Creating enterprise-level development tools is a complex business. Such tools, said Goodman, have to contend with multiple platforms, databases, networks and complex business rules. In addition, enterprise applications must support multiple users, often in dispersed locations. (See "PROPERTIES OF ENTERPRISE-LEVEL APPLICATIONS") What separates popular tools like Powerbuilder, Visual Basic and SQL Windows from their more high-end counterparts? "The difference between departmental and enterprise-wide tools lies in how they handle scalability issues. Enterprise-class applications have to accommodate very large levels of transaction throughput while still providing good performance," said Dave Sanders, senior vice president of technology and development at CableData Inc., a subsidiary of U.S. Computer Services headquartered in El Dorado Hills, Calif.

"If an application is to be scalable, it has to be able to spread its processing over multiple servers and clients," said Sanders. "An enterprise-level tool has to be able to provide this flexible partitioning for both the application's business processing and the TP monitor's processing."

Further, tools must be able to take advantage of the distributed database connectivity offered in some database products. Oracle's Parallel Server feature, for example, "allows an application to span multiple machines with one instance of the database," sold Sanders.

CableData uses both Oracle and Tandem Non-Stop SQL databases for its Subscriber Management System. The application, used by large cable providers or multiple systems operators, maintains a customer information database on 35 million cable viewers. It also collects and sends billing information to CableData's billing system.

Sanders said, "We used the Dynasty Development Environment tool to develop this application because of its power and flexibility. We can program at the business logic level, rather than at the API level, so it improves our productivity. After the application has been written, it can be partitioned as necessary."

The tool, said Sanders, maintains a knowledge base that "provides the developer with transparent support for many databases and platforms. Because the tool has access to this knowledge base, the application takes advantage of the performance benefits particular to a given platform or database."

Scalability is likewise important to Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), Kent, Wash., a large recreational equipment and clothing retailer. Ralph Day, communications network supervisor, said REI has more than 300 stores, each with a customer service desk that handles inventory management, sales history, and manufacturer and product data.

Performance problems recently drove REI to revamp its customer service application. Said Day, "Because the response time of our old customer service application was as slow as 45 seconds, we decided to redevelop it using the Progress Application Development Environment."

A development tool, said Day, "has to provide good connectivity to and good performance on multiple databases and back-end processors. Progress provides a good tie to development database controls, ensuring that they are easily added to a screen."

REI's new system uses DB2 running on an AS/400 server. A Progress data server interfaces between DB2 and the WAN-based clients in the stores. The PC clients run Microsoft's Windows.

"Our redevelopment effort was successful. The new system's response time is less than two seconds," said Day.

Logical Conclusions

Beyond scaling well, enterprise-level development tools need to handle complex logical functions. And simplifying the processing to make it fit the tool's language is not the answer. Complex requirements require complex code, said John Shekleton, systems Manager for The Star Tribune, a publication of Cowles Media Corp., Minneapolis. "When you back away from complexity, you back away from flexibility," he said. "This is not a decision for the tool to make. It should be made by the business for business reasons."

Toolsets differ in how their languages accommodate the coding of complex business and technological functions. Their high-level scripting languages do not provide for API-level coding, sometimes required for performance reasons.

At Jyacc, New York City, for example, developers believe that some things cannot be written at the specification level. Accordingly, the company's JAM toolset allows programmers to write C code and integrate it into the JAM application in areas where they want to improve performance or customize.

Other developers contend that an application's logic should be written, and thus easily maintained, at the level of business function specification. Jeffrey Geltz, manager of wholesale information services at New England Power Co., Westborough, Mass., said, "A tool's scripting language should be extensible; that is, able to handle complexity without dropping to a lower-level language to accomplish the functionality."

Geltz's group selected CA-OpenRoad from Computer Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y., as the development tool for its Natural Gas Management System. The application, slated for deployment in January, comprises 70 modules that handle the "well-head-to-burner-tip" processing of natural gas, said Geltz.

"The application's functions are very difficult and far-reaching," he said. "They include the purchasing, marketing and billing of natural gas, along with performing margin calculations, reporting, transaction management, contract processing, vendor tracking, analysis, thermal heat conversions and currency conversions." The application runs on a DEC VAX server using a CA-Ingres database, connected over a Novell network to Windows-based PC clients.

For its part, The Star Tribune has stayed with Cobol. "We use Cobol because it can handle whatever complexity arises. It is transportable after recompilation and allows us to debug our front and back ends scamlessly," said Shekleton. Production applications include customer service, routing and order handling for more than a million addresses. The IS group uses Sterling Software's Key: Construct for GUI toolset, which generates Cobol code for both sides of the platform -- the RS/6000 servers and the OS/2 clients.

The legacy systems that are the children of Cobol remain a concern for companies developing for new architectures. Mainframe-based legacy data often needs to connect to distributed applications. Many companies choose to leave the legacy data on the mainframe because it may be impractical or risky to rewrite the legacy applications for the client/server platform.

"Enterprisc-level systems must integrate well with other software, whether developed in-house or purchased from third-party vendors," said Mark Moorman, program manager for applications development at SAS Institute Inc., Cary, N.C. "IS shops are moving away from Cobol and other legacy-based tools, but not in major migrations. The move to the newer technology is being done slowly and cautiously."

The ability to reference mainframe legacy data was a requirement, when the Ottawa-based Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) department developed a new citizenship system. The purpose of the new system, said Terry Kearsley, chief of national systems, "is to improve the citizenship process for people immigrating to Canada. Because the process involves legal requirements for citizenship, it has a high political visibility."

According to Kearsley, CIC chose Huron ObjectStar from Antares Alliance Group, Dallas, to develop the system because the tool has strong prototyping capabilities, and could interface smoothly with legacy data. "ObjectStar provides a strong distributed data capability, making it easy to get at data on a variety of legacy databases," he said.

To determine an applicant's eligibility, the application accesses legacy data that resides on geographically distributed databases housing immigration and citizenship data. Immigration data resides on a Unisys DMS/2 database in Belleville, Ontario, while citizenship data resides on a Model 204 database in Ottawa. The system also checks for enforcement actions to ensure the applicant has not been involved in criminal activity. The Model 204 database is then updated with the eligible applicant's citizenship records.

Initially, the agency plans to run the system on Unix servers in 21 offices throughout Canada. Servers arc HP 9000s and IBM Rs/6000s; client workstations run Motif, and eventually, Windows.

Beyond its role as host to legacy applications, the mainframe continues to hold an attraction for some IS organizations, who value its stability and reliability as a development platform. Mainframe equipment is typically more stable than, say, a desktop platform, which is more vulnerable to misuse by office workers.

In selecting a development tool, development environment stability was a determining factor for Jim Wilson, integrator and business partner of information services and technology at Consumers Power Co., Jackson, Mich. Faced with reengineering a critical order and fulfillment application, Wilson selected the Foundation for Cooperative Processing toolset from Andersen Consulting, Chicago.

The new application includes a scheduling and work management component slated to run at 50 sites throughout Michigan. The two-tiered application will run on a mainframe-based DB2 server connected to OS/2 clients via a TCP/IP network. The Andersen toolset supports a large development team, providing check in/check out and version control of the source code, Wilson said.

With more than a thousand people using the application, reliability is critical, said Wilson. "The firm cannot tolerate frequent outages on this application because workers arc scheduled based on the information it manages. If it goes down and is unavailable, we lose money and we lose the satisfaction of our customers," he said.

For clothing manufacturer Lee Company, Merriam, Kansas, reuse was a determining factor in its development tool selection, said Systems Analyst Jeff Unger. The firm chose IBM's VisualAge toolset to develop a new application for account executives. "The new application has to support the account executive in the field who is managing inventory and sales at the retail store level," said Unger. "The application also integrates with legacy applications that perform forecasting and point-of-sale processing. With an aggressive timeframe -- deployment by the beginning of 1996 -- and an incremental development methodology, code reusability is essential."

The application uses OS/2's Warp Connect to transport mainframe- and Risc-based data through an OS/2 server to account executives' laptop computers. Lee selected VisualAge because it supports C++, code reuse, facilitated GUI development and improved programmer productivity, said Unger. Also, he added, "we needed IBM's 32-bit addressing capability in order to handle multithreading."

The advantages of reuse have companies looking to such tools as NextStep from Next Computer Inc., Redwood City, Calif., an object-oriented development environment, and Seer*HPS from Seer Technologies, which allows reusability through its repository of executables. The library is provided by Seer but can be extended by the developer.

Just as there's more to applications than their front ends, there must be more to development tools than GUI-building capabilities. Enterprise-class client/server applications, in particular, are a demanding lot. And, as yet, no one high-end tool can claim to do it all.

RELATED ARTICLE: PROPERTIES OF ENTERPRISE - LEVEL APPLICATIONS

* Transaction-oriented and built with a transaction

centric language. * Support a large number of users * Operate across multiple platforms that may be

geographically dispersed * Data-intensive, processing input data from heterogenous

sources, including legacy applications * Support more than one database technology;

usually LAN- or WAN-based * Processing includes complex business rules * Long-lived, requiring features that facilitate

support and maintenance * Often deployed globally; must support multiple

languages and currencies Source: Progress Software

RELATED ARTICLE: REPRESENTATIVE CLIENT/SERVER DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

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