CDE Programming Competition

At this year's CODA conference (last month), Oracle held its first CDE Programming Competition. A press release is included below, but I have a question for interested parties.

We are considering doing this again with of course a different problem at this year's IOUW conference. Would you be interested in competing? Would you be interested in us allowing the use of Oracle CASE? Would you be interested in us allowing the use of products other than CDE tools? If your answer is yes to any of the above, would you be willing to show up a day early to work on this?

Please reply directly to me. I can be reached at 'dbmoore_at_us.oracle.com' or US+415-506-3110.

    23 ORACLE CDE DEVELOPERS BUILD PRODUCTION-GRADE APPLICATIONS IN ONE DAY             Oracle Announces Winner of Oracle CDE Programming Competition  

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., April 6, 1994--Oracle today announced the winner of the First Annual Oracle Cooperative Development Environment (CDE) Programming Competition. The 23 contestants, ranging from corporate application developers and government contractors to independent consultants and value-added resellers, entered the CDE Programming Competition last week at CODA. Using Oracle CDE 4GLs (Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle Graphics), they created in seven hours the Oracle Brokerage System, a stock trading application including modules for trading stocks, tracking stock prices, adding and profiling customers, and analyzing customer portfolios. After a stringent review process, trade press and industry analyst judges selected Michael Stowe of Constellation Engineering, Inc. (Chicago) the overall winner.  

Easy-to-Learn, Easy-to-Use  

One of the eight finalists, Kevin Meade, Practical Relational Solutions
(Norwich, Conn.), had never used CDE products before entering the competition
Sunday.

        "I had never coded a graphical application before, but with the incredibly short learning curve of CDE, I was able to become productive immediately and complete an application that included several modules," said Meade. "There is obviously a well-planned infrastructure and a great deal of inherent power in CDE that I've only begun to tap. After my experience using CDE products, I am now confident of my ability to develop GUI applications on Windows."  

Judges and Judging Criteria  

Judges were selected from a pool of leading industry analysts, trade press and application development experts including: Charles Babcock, Computerworld; Darlene Brown, Gartner Group; Tom Halfhill, BYTE; David Kalman, DBMS; David Stodder, Database Programming and Design; Kevin Strehlo, Datamation; Brent Williams, IDC; and Oracle executives.

        The criteria used to judge the applications included ease-of-use and attractiveness of the user interface, as well as functionality of and integration between modules. Michael Stowe received an average score of 90% in all categories.

        "Competitions like this allow independent consultants to demonstrate their abilities with CDE. After nine hours, the final applications can operate equally well for a single user or an enterprise," said Stowe. "The new CDE tools are extremely scalable and powerful--and, obviously, productive--which all the entrants proved. I am gratified to win the competition and look forward to applying the same skills and techniques in a business environment, hopefully, with less pressure."  

Oracle CDE Continues to Lead Client/Server Tools Market  

Third quarter (ending February 28, 1994) revenues are $78 million for CDE new product licenses. According to International Data Corp., Oracle is the largest independent software vendor to provide programmer development tools in the world, in a market research report dated September 1993. Gartner Group positions Oracle a client/server 4GL leader with highest client/server vision and ability to implement at their Annual Symposium in October 1993.

        Oracle CDE is an open, integrated solution for developing enterprise client/server information systems. CDE spans every phase of the software development life cycle from business modeling to deployment and includes CASE
(computer-aided systems engineering), 4GL, 3GL and end-user tools. CDE's
repository-driven, modular approach allows any or all of its tools to be used for fast development of scalable, cross-platform distributed applications. Received on Sat Apr 16 1994 - 03:17:13 CEST