HELP: Please help, what client-tool to use for developing client-server applications?

Prior of buying, and most of all dedicated to one client tool for developing client-server applications, I would like the comments of users who already have the experience of more than one to make a comparison among them.

In my company we are thinking of moving from our COBOL legacy system to client-server. Observed several rdbms, and settled to Oracle or Sybase, because they have good support here in Greece. The problem aroused for the tools. Oracle wants to use their products (developer2000 and designer2000) which seems good at spec, but we have heard numerous things for them (they GPF, they are heavy, they are slow etc) but one main thing that made us give a second thought, it was their price, which is very expensive (at least here in Greece, where salaries are too slow compared to US for example). On the other end, Sybase moves its Powerbuilder, for which I heard also same things as an immature product too, and slow. In usenet several users propose other products (Delphi, Jam etc) which makes the situtation even worse for us to decide. We are only two (2) developers, and our budget is low, so we can't afford the money and most of all the time, to test every possible platform (or even some of them) before we decide. And because the time invested on one tool, plus the money for education on this would be too much to later abandon,

WE WOULD LIKE YOUR OPINIONS PLEASE !!!!! We seek the opinions of developers who tried more than one of the products (Developer2000/Designer2000, Powerbuilder/S-Designor, Delphi2 C/S, VisualBasic, Jam etc ) and can give their opinions. Some notes of the strengths of their preferred tool that is not available on others is highly prefered.
Also sites with documents which compare various tools would be helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Please reply also by e-mail, because I may miss the post, due to IBM which has a lot of problems with it's news servers the last year.

Savas Pavlidis

pavlidis_at_ibm.net Received on Tue Apr 01 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST