TierDeveloper 4.0 Enterprise Edition
Ainy
San Ramon, California
(925) 236-3830
www.alachisoft.com
TierDeveloper is a combined object-relational mapper (that is, it
takes care of turning database rows into objects and vice versa) and
application generator for .NET. I took a look at the high-end edition
of the recently-released version 4.0; there's also a $595 Professional
Edition. The difference is that Professional supports either VB.NET or
C# while Enterprise supports both, and Enterprise supports more
databases, application types, and customizations.
TierDeveloper is pretty simple to use. You start by creating a new
project, and connecting it to a database. Microsoft Access support is
new in this version, but you can also use DB2, SQL Server, or Oracle
databases. Choose the tables that contain the objects, and the
operations you want to perform, and TierDeveloper figures out the
properties of its own abstract objects. Then you can generate and
build a host of different things: the core components, a Web GUI, a
WinForms GUI, a remoted GUI, and more. For turning a database into an
application with one screen per table, things could scarcely be
easier.
Besides Access support, some of the new features in 4.0 include:
· The ability to define new objects in TierDeveloper and have it
generate the DDL to add them to the database.
· Custom handling for NULL values
· Customizable GUIs for the generated applications via an XML file of
metadata
· Schema DDL generation so you can build a copy of the database for
test use
· HTML documentation generation
As with any application generator, you'll probably want to customize
the end result before you turn users loose on it. However, the
generated ASP.NET and WinForms applications are perfectly usable for
database administration, and the underlying objects are robust enough
to use wherever you'd like them. The quickest way to see whether this
can be useful to you is to visit the online demos, and then download a
sample copy. You get 30 days to experiment with your own database,
which should be enough to decide whether the TierDeveloper approach
makes sense in your own work.
ADTMAG
Mike Gunderloy