Oracle 8 users aren’t going to be able to create applications that utilize objects and extended data types stored in the database until Oracle Corp ships its Object Database Designer in six months time. It had originally said by year-end. Oracle turned to ODD – a snapshot of a full-blown upgrade of the company’s Designer/2000 CASE modeling tools – on the day chief executive Larry Ellison abandoned Sedona, a suite of Windows- based Basic language tools originally intended for use with Oracle 8 (CI No 3,181). Sedona’s replacement, enabled for end-to- end Java and OMG Corba programming in addition to the company’s proprietary PL/SQL language, is being built around Borland International’s JBuilder Java development environment. Oracle says it will describe plans for the new tools suite at its Oracle World conference in Los Angeles next month. The object translation technology being contributed to Sedona project by Visual Edge technology Ltd looks to have been given the heave ho from the new suite. Oracle says it’s unlikely there’ll be anything salvageable from the Basic-based technology which was to have debuted as Object Mediator. Sedona’s original design point, a set of Basic language tools for creating client/server applications, simply couldn’t meet the present-day requirement for supporting Java-based computing, Oracle said. Even its own applications group had shunned the technology. Oracle says all of the new tools will be used internally by the application group which is helping to specify them. The ODD modeling tool will generate C++ class definitions corresponding to Oracle8 data types, and reverse-engineer them onto a graphical model. Oracle8’s object cache provides objects and models with run-time access to Oracle8.
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