Reviews
Review: Deklarit 3.0
- By Mike Gunderloy
- April 20, 2004
DeKlarit 3.0
$899
ARTech
Chicago, Illinois
(312) 836-9242
www.deklarit.com
DeKlarit is a code generator for Visual Studio .NET (it's well and
thoroughly integrated with the VS .NET IDE, feeling like a native part
of the environment) that begins by letting you define the structure of
your data, not as database tables, but as "business components".
Business components can include calculated columns and validation rules,
and they don't necessarily need to be completely normalized (for
instance, DeKlarit will figure out that it needs to build a linking
table to handle m-n relations). From there, you can build out the data
to any supported DBMS: Oracle, SQL Server, Access, or SQL Server CE
(support for the latter two is new in this version).
Also new in this version is the Business Framework Prototyper. This tool
lets you work with your business objects, entering data and seeing how
they work together. You can load existing data, filter it, enter new
data, follow relationships, and so on. If something doesn't feel right,
it's easy to go back and refine your model a bit more.
But that's far from all that DeKlarit can do. After you've built your
business objects, it will then build business logic and database access
layers for you, in either VB .NET or C#. It uses standard ADO.NET typed
DataSets and DataAdapter objects for this. These classes are all well
fleshed out with a ton of utility methods. The DeKlarit help will show
you how to use these objects as the foundation of your own application.
Or, if you prefer, you can click a few buttons and let DeKlarit generate
an application for you. You can get complete ASP.NET or Windows Forms
applications. If you own the Infragistics components, this version of
DeKlarit adds a Web application generator that can use them, giving you
a pretty spiffy user interface. Also new in 3.0 is an application
generator for smart devices; this makes DeKlarit the first tool in this
category that I know of that tackles the combination of SQL Server CE
and the .NET Compact Framework.
There are plenty of other little (and not so little) improvements in
this version as well. These include source code control, a templating
system that lets you customize application generation, support for .NET
remoting and a declarative caching syntax. All in all the ARTech people
have done a fine job of helping build line of business applications
quickly. You can find more details and a trial download at their Web
site.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.