Hitachi Europe has finally started to ship its much-hyped AppGallery Visual Basic-like development environment, after many months of hints and pre-briefings (CI No 2,979). The product, which is firmly targeted at the Windows and Windows NT world is designed to build applications using Object Linking & Embedding and ActiveX components. Java applets are supported, but native Java component creation is not. These components, according to Hitachi, can either be standard such as Microsoft Corp’s Word or Excel or generated using AppGallery’s scripting language for specific business tasks. From the developers viewpoint, AppGallery will enable users to visualize chosen components on a canvass and drag and drop them on to each other, whereby auto matic links are created between components. At this point a wizard is invoked so developers can specifiy databases to be chosen, or specific fields or any other pre- requisites given. AppGallery is shipping now, and it is supplied with pre-packaged components.
