Omnis Software, now a part of Raining Data, has a demo version of Omnis Studio for OS X available on its Web site.
It includes a simple porting wizard that means Omnis developers will be able to port existing libraries very quickly to take advantage of OS X (in Carbon, not in Classic), Mark Aspinall, vice president of corporate marketing for Raining Data, told MacCentral.
Omnis Studio is a high-performance visual RAD tool that provides a component-based environment for building graphical user interfaces (GUI) interfaces within e-commerce, database and client/server applications. When used with the company’s Web Client plug-in technology, Omnis Studio allows the development of client/server relationships over the Internet using the common Web browsers.
Aspinall said that a styles tool has been added so that developers can easily take advantage of the Aqua feel on the next generation operating system, but still have “Windows grey” (or anything else they fancy) on other boxes. The Omnis libraries will now run quite happily on OS 9, OS X, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, and many flavors of Linux, all without modification, he added.
“I think it’s a testament to our development team that the cross-platform functionality continues to extend to new boxes,” he added. “If I tell you that we have a version for Sun SparcStation ready now for release in the next few months, you’ll understand what I mean, and they’re always proving just how robust the core technology and design really is.”
Omnis Studio has been designed to meet the needs of the emerging Business Intelligence Systems and Application Service Providers markets. The core of the product has been rewritten to take full advantage of multi-threading when executing methods or directly accessing databases such as Oracle, DB2 and Sybase. This significantly improves the efficiency with which simultaneous users can access, use and modify the same data, said Aspinall. Load sharing extends this functionality across a number of servers, with Omnis dynamically allocating the least used server as each new client accesses the program. These two innovations create an environment where Web-based applications are much closer to the traditional client/server user experience, saidAspinall.
Pricing is as follows: Standard version US$149, Enterprise $599, and Web Edition $1,475.