Re: Oracle Designer vs VB?

Vince Mounts <chalkpie_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote in article <01bc6786$7b1ce0e0$c682dccf_at_vbmhome-pc>...
> Hi there,
>
> Thanks in advance,
> V
> vince_mounts_at_usa.net
>

Whoa!!

I read the comments to this thread from Client Exceler and and Dennis Taylor and could only conclude that these guys are just VB Zealots and have never programmed in Oracle Developer/2000 or used Oracle Designer/2000.

As a VB Developer AND Developer/2000 developer I have to clear a few things up:

First of all, I agree with the statement that "better" is relative to what you are doing. Contrary to popular belief, VB is not the perfect solution to every problem. With that said it not hurt to be profiecent in more than one tool. If you look through classes that are tainted with VB then you may miss other better solutions and will do a disservice to you customer.

Designer/2000 is a real CASE tool that can generate Developer/2000, Visual Basic, Java, and C++ Code. It is a powerfull tool that can also be used to design database schemas for various database not just Oracle. It hundreds of times more powerfull than the modeler that comes with VB5EE. It is an excellent software engineering tool and is used for projects where you just can't plain hack code.

It is not harder to develop in Developer/2000 than VB. The Difference is that VB is an all purpose development environment where as Developer/2000 was developed specifically for developing database applications and is thus tuned and archetected for that single purpose. Oracle Developer/2000 CAN USE ODBC but for Oracle databases it DOES USE SQL*NET. You can use Developer/2000 against ANY database. PL/SQL is no more difficult to use than VB. The debugger for Developer/2000 is lacking but VB debugger is sometimes no better. Oracle's documentation may be poor but the Microsoft documentation is not perfect either. Microsoft has errors in it documentation and so do many other vendors for that matter.

Although it is true that there is not a lot of 3rd party support, you can use the same VBXs, OCXs, and DLLs that you can use in VB. You can even make Windows API calls using FFI statements. I have even written OLE controls in VB that are used by Developer/2000 applications.

Oracle Developers get paid the same if not more than VB programmers. Check out the posts in oracle newsgroups as well as the jobs newsgroups. The Oracle salaries are on par or better.

Knowing Oracle will not hurt you, it can only benefit you because ORacle has some 78% or more of the database market.

One benefit you get from Oracle that you do not get from VB. A single piece of source code can be compiled to run under character mode, Window 3.1, Window 95, Window NT, Macintosh, Motif, and Java. VB only runs on Windows. And if it where up to Microsoft only the latest version of Windows.

VB is not always the best solution and your employer may have found a reason to use Oracle Developer/2000 instead. Learning more than one tool will not kill you and you may gain some insite about what is good and bad about VB by learning another tool.

My 32-bits,

Enzo Maini
enmaini_at_pcnet.com Received on Sat May 24 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT