Jeff Winchell

Launching a technology into stardom begins with an enormous creative effort. The combined technical and marketing forces pouring out of Java tool vendors is as impressive as the fires fueling the giant first stage of a Saturn rocket. But the first stage burns out quickly, followed by a less flashy, more sustained effort. With 75 percent of developers programming database applications, Java IDEs must tap this fuel to reach a long-lasting orbit. Powersoft's high-end RAD tools, PowerBuilder and Optima++, have won numerous awards serving the needs of database application developers. So it's no surprise that their first Java development tool, PowerJ, goes far beyond first generation Java IDEs to provide a visual, practical, database-oriented Java development environment. This article reviews a surprisingly polished public beta of PowerJ, available for download at http://w... (more)