Clipper developers turn to ObjectView. (Matesys Corp.) (Software Review) (evaluation)

Tools optimized for client/server application development have been slow to emerge. Find out why ex-Clipper developers turned to Matesys' ObjectView.

At SQLSoft, we've spent the last few years as a Clipper shop developing custom character-based PC applications for our clients. Even though Clipper is extremely powerful and has cornered a sizable portion of the X-Base development market, we began sensing the strategic importance of Windows in 1989. In addition, we could see the benefits of the emerging client/server architecture based on database engines like SQL Server.

Robust Windows development environments for the client/front ends, however, have been slow to emerge. So it's pretty exciting to report that after months of waiting, looking, and evaluating, we think we've found what we want for Windows application development.

ObjectView saves time

ObjectView, from Matesys Corp., is one of those rare products that appeals both to users and Windows application developers. It has a short learning curve, yet it's robust enough to develop a fairly sophisticated internal contact management system to access a back-end" SQL Server-which we did in less than two weeks.

It's also fast

We chose ObjectView for several reasons. First and foremost was its speed, which initially caught our attention. We haven't seen anything faster at returning SQL queries in Windows-based front ends. We run SQL Server 1.1 on OS/2 1.21 with a LAN Manager 2.0 network. Our server is a 386-25 with 16M RAM and two 200M hard drives. All of our workstations are 386s with at least 4M RAM running Windows 3.0 in enhanced mode. Our contact management system is made up of three tables. The main contact table contains about 11,000 records averaging around 250 characters per record. A sample query of 226 records is returned to my workstation in about 3 seconds, and this includes selecting the count of the number of records as well as returning the data.