InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 29, 1999
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Forté Software Inc. is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1991 by former executives from Oracle, Ingres, and several other relational database vendors. The company's resulting product attempts to maximize robustness and scalability while helping companies speed development and complete their projects on schedule.
On the development side, Forté uses a proprietary language called the Transactional Object Oriented Language (Tool), although future versions of the product will be built to support development in Java as well. Though Tool is powerful, its proprietary nature requires some education on the part of those using it, which may dissuade those companies unwilling to invest in learning a new system.
Forté's most powerful features come in an area almost completely ignored by other vendors: simplifying deployment (rather than development). WebEnteprise has the ability to "make a distribution" for a developed application that's ready to be deployed. The distribution process determines where the file is intended to go and optimizes the application to work at its best in the target environment. Other useful features include the ability to keep more than one version of a single application running simultaneously, making it possible to perform staged upgrades in a controlled manner.
HahtSite Application Server 4.0
Haht Software Inc. has been in the business of providing Web application development tools since 1995. The HahtSite product was originally conceived as a full-featured development tool and deployment engine for enterprise Web applications. This hasn't changed, but in its most recent release, the product's target market and target application has.
Though the system's hallmarks remain, Haht has been redefining its product to simplify integration with SAP applications. This moves the system away from the likes of Microsoft's Visual InterDev and Allaire's ColdFusion, although the system still makes the most of in-house Visual Basic and Java development skills.
Haht also has several partner programs designed to help developers create their own business solutions or to create extensions and products for use by end users of HahtSite.
Haht has forged a strong relationship with SAP, and has created a set of HahtSite applications that come with SAP R/3 out of the box. These applications also come with a tremendous learning curve, as they present numerous options and may require users to go through a dozen screens in order to capture the information required to complete a single transaction.
Fortunately, the HTML interfaces are easy to use once they're understood, and they greatly simplify the process of interacting with SAP R/3 over the Web.
The application server portion of Application Server 4.0 falls into the mid- to high-range server category. In addition, Haht is one of the few vendors to offer a product with a vertical application focus, in which it or a partner organization builds applications that run on a version of the HahtSite Application Server built by an original equipment manufacturer.
Intertop Server 2.0
Intertop Corp. takes an interesting approach to Web applications, forgoing the usual HTML front ends provided by most Web development tools and servers. Instead, Intertop supplies a custom thin-client interface that installs on the client PC. Despite current IT demands for lower cost of ownership and reduced client-side administration, it remains to be seen whether the market will embrace Intertop's approach.
Still, there are significant benefits to client-side processing, which can be deployed effectively in intranet environments in particular. The continuing instability and unpredictability of client-side Java makes products such as Intertop Server a good compromise, and the product provides efficiency advantages in network communications between client and server.
Intertop Server works well for those applications that need advanced client-side processing that HTML just can't handle, but that still operate over a Web connection. Application development is simple and uses Visual Basic syntax, but the client software approach is not likely to resonate with companies that need widespread, broad-based applications with no client requirement.
Tango Enterprise 3.5/4.0
In late 1998, Pervasive Software Inc. bought EveryWare Development Inc. and its Tango product line. Pervasive, best known for its BTrieve database, which is embedded in many software products, has now moved into the Web application development market.
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