BUSINESS INTEGRATION AND DATA TOOLS
Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect
Microsoft
 Seth Adams, Business Manager for MSDN Subscriptions |
While Visual Studio .NET as a whole snagged a Productivity Award in 2001, the
2002 Enterprise Architect edition was deemed Jolt-worthy by this year’s
panel. The edition enhances the IDE that many judges feel is already the single
best development environment today, providing full lifecycle support for enterprise
development by leveraging Visio for UML design, project specification and database
architecture. Round-trip capabilities enable developers to dynamically design,
build and test prototypes in a remarkably short time frame. In addition, it
comes with templates that provide best practices and specify development policy.
Add to these extensive support for XML, Microsoft’s new .NET languages—as
well as compatibility with traditional programming languages—and you have
a tool that enables enterprise developers to be productive in more ways than
any we’ve seen in a long time.
—Andrew Binstock
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Macromedia ColdFusion MX
ColdFusion MX is an outstanding classic, totally rewritten in Java. The
advantage? You can build your Web application in record time. This time
around, Macromedia has enhanced ease-of-use by allowing complex procedural
control flow in tags so developers can include logic in HTML pages without
having to dip into Perl or Java. New components include full text search,
charting, and remote Flash—but you can also write your own powerful
objects, taking advantage of support for inheritance and state. ColdFusion
will automatically generate the supporting WSDL for those components,
underlining Macromedia’s commitment to making life simpler for the
developer. —Roland Racko |
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SQL Anywhere Studio
SQL Anywhere Studio 8.0.2 is a comprehensive package that provides data
management and enterprise-wide synchronization. What’s impressive
about this product? It coordinates data from most of the devices we see
in the enterprise: desktops, laptops, mobile and embedded; and supports
most operating systems, including Windows, Unix, Novell and handheld platforms.
Regardless of connection or application type, SQL Anywhere Studio ensures
“always available” access to data and corporate applications.
Offline operation is enabled through data synchronization and fully transactional
local data management. Adaptive Server Anywhere is a small-footprint mobile
and embedded DBMS optimized for use on workgroup servers, laptops and
handheld devices, supporting both single-user and multi-user implementations.
Support for OLE DB, ODBC, JDBC, Sybase OpenClient and Embedded SQL is
available. 2000 Productivity Award winner. —Sue Spielman |
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IBM WebSphere Studio IBM WebSphere 5 has all the Web application tools and technologies you need in one customizable environment to develop a modern Web application, complete with tutorials and “cheat sheets.” The cheat sheets help navigate through the builders, editors and wizards required to build an application. WebSphere tools can be divided into Java, Web and miscellaneous categories. The Java tools include a J2EE set that helps package J2EE and Web modules into Enterprise Application Archive (EAR) files. WebSphere also offers tools for EJB development, Java coding and Java profiling.
The Web tools work with HTML, CSS, JSP, servlets, Web services, XML schemas,
DTDs and XSLT scripts. The miscellaneous category includes a Web server
configuration tool and a database tool that creates and edits DB entities.
2000 Productivity Award winner. —Hugh Bawtree |