Tools

[Dragi Raos]

Hi, everybody!

I was pretty excited when I saw there is open source ERP effort, and
then a bit disappointed when I discovered that, while tools part of the
effort got under way quite nicely, actuall apps are still far away.
Perhaps that's in part because of reinventing the wheel on the tools
side.

I would like to point app developers' attention to another open source
app dev tool, POSSL (www://www.possl.org). The tool author, New
York-based Prolifics (www://www.prolifics.com) simply opened version
4.28 of Linux port of their cross-platform tool, Panther, and left it
from there on to the community (which has not done much).

The tool currently works on all Unix-based OSes and Windows (Prolifics
recently abandoned Mac, VMS and a score of other, more obscure
platforms) with a variety of database back-ends, with several middleware
packages (open-source version only with WebSphere or stand-alone,
propriatery also with BEA products and COM/DCOM/MTS), and in character
mode, GUI and Web (from the same forms). It has form, report and menu
designer, client runtime with debugger, server-side components and Web
app broker. Logic is programmed in any mixture of C, Java and
propriatery interpreted 4GL, JPL.

Perhaps this list is not the right place to hawk 'competing' tool, but I
simply thought that some of the people here might want to take a look.
It is one of the most undeservedly neglected tools I know of (both open
source and propriatery version of it - though the later has some very
impressive references and is actually doing well, though quietly so).

Just my 0.15 HRK (that is, two cents).

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia