Servoy Featured in eWEEK (again!)

Many thanks to journalist extraordinaire – Frank Ohlhorst for being kind enough to include us in his excellent eWEEK cover story article “Armed & Ready” in the August 2008 issue.

In the article Frank outlines the “7 Criteria For Choosing The Right Tool” – and it sounds like it was custom-designed to describe exactly what Servoy is. NOTE: The stuff in italics does not appear in the original article and are my comments:

1. Commonality: A single development model has to cover both desktop and web users, and support native RDBMS, SQL Server, MySQL and PDF reporting. They didn’t mention Sybase, DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. that Servoy supports – but hey, you get the idea.
2. Speed of Development: The tool must have a professional IDE that reduces or eliminates the need for handwritten code. Eclipse is the most-used IDE on the plant – and code samples allow you to get fully working code in a single click.
3. Performance: The tool has to be on par with desktop-only applications. Of course performance is important – but so is scalability. Any product is “fast” with a single user!
4. Ease of use: Language tools are intuitive and allow faster development than Visual Basic, PHP or others. Yes – especially these days. You want your tool to be more productive, and not less productive. That’s why we’ve done a direct comparison between Servoy and .NET.
5. Versatility: There is complete end-user customization of forms, field rules (via XML) and styles (via CSS). In Servoy you can also extend and integrate the environment itself via Java.
6. Integrity: All processing is centralized There would be no client/server or thick client updates. We totally agree – that’s why Servoy’s Web Client processing is all done on the server side – maximum performance, maximum security, maximum concurrency.
7. Functionality: Extensive use of standard library functions cover just about anything, including instance XML DOM manipulation, instead of having to use third-party libraries or extensive custom development. Servoy has it – CHECK!

If you’re thinking about rewriting your application in a tool – make sure that whatever you choose meets those 7 criteria. It’ll save you tons of time and money!