Corel Paradox 9 Developer Edition

Rating:
Summary: Treats all datasources as equal
Review: Best development tool for companies with heterogeneous data sources: One of Paradox's biggest benefits is that it treats all datasources as equal, and that you can tie them together despite being on different machines, OSs, and server software. With Access's current setup, you can't really deal with more than one datasource at a time, and the reality is that other than the very few all-MS shops out there, any company of moderate size has data strewn over a bunch of different systems.

Rating:
Summary: Custom Software Authoring made easy!
Review: Paradox 9DE is the single best introduction to real programming. People with a database background will find it easy. I found it to be the easiest Visual development program that comes with a complete language. It is funny that I am also a beginner and it gave me the first taste of programming power with its ObjectPAL. Paradox Developer Edition has an "Application Framework" with the basics pre-programmed for you (much easier than doing an interface from scratch in VB or Delphi). Then you start to build your application inside that framework using "forms". There is a book named "Database Design for Mere Mortals" by Mike Hernandez. It served me as the "key" of what can be accomplished in Paradox 9 DE. You can find the book here. I was looking for "authoring" tools and eventually spent a few hundred dollars on them. I have a friend who is a good FoxPro programmer and he told me "don't spend the money on prosthetic brain replacements, study programming and when you start to grasp the power of a language, authoring tools will appear like a child's toy" and he was right. I was always hunting for the most powerful "authoring environment" when the simple fact is that if you work hard with programming concepts for a few months, one day comes when it all starts to make sense. Paradox is unique in that you take a piece of code and attach it to an object (button, checkbox, etc). It will do what you tell it to do. It makes learning easy for aspiring programmers without compromises in what can be done. And last but not least everything you need for building SQL and Client/Server applications is in the box. Period. JPdox is a separate included application (feels like Visual Basic) that builds JAVA forms for the Web, which can connect live to your Paradox database (if you're familiar with TCP/IP and want to run a serious, solid JAVA data-driven website from your NT server). Application developer? The end product you build will look, feel and WORK like any other Windows application. Data-driven web using Java? All the monkeys are in the box. Authoring - did you buy an "authoring" tool to make a small program only to discover it lacks database support, it doesn't support checkboxes and it's variables hold only 256 characters? Did it cost a little more than Paradox? Well, no game or multimedia authoring tool is complete without Paradox, whether it has the ability to query a database or not.