PowerSite Straddles the Object World

Sybase's PowerSite offers an easy way to mix Java and ActiveX apps on the most popular Web servers.

Steve Gillmor

As the Web matures, a new class of enterprise tools is mixing and matching the best of Microsoft's Active platform and technologies based on Sun's Java and JavaBeans. Sybase's PowerSite Enterprise 1.0 blends these open and proprietary Internet standards to produce, deploy, and manage dynamic Web sites on the leading Web-server platforms from Microsoft and Netscape.

PowerSite ships with everything you need for rapid, team-based, scalable Web application development: Internet Explorer (IE) 4.0 for integrated Web browsing, Powe rDynamo 2.0 Application Server for testing and debugging on local or remote machines, DataWindow Builder 6.0. for building and maintaining reusable database queries , PowerX for automatically generating ActiveX and design-time controls, and Sybase SQL Anywhere Server 5.5 Development Version for hosting PowerSite's Component Manager.

PowerSite's JavaScript-based object model adds an abstraction layer to absorb the common elements of today's leading Web application-server engines, including Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), Netscape LiveWire, and PowerSoft PowerDynamo. Developers can write once and deploy to many different servers without modification, leveraging more advanced application-server engines, such as ASP, while adding JavaScript to enhance less powerful midtier servers.

During Web deployment, vendor-specific HTML- and PowerSite-generated function libraries interact to produce essentially the same functionality on each target ser ver. For example, the ASP deployment controller generates your site to NT's Internet Information Server (IIS), changing file extensions to ASP where appropriate. However, you must still manually create any virtual mappings and ODBC entries that your site needs.

PowerSite's extensible deployment controller and design-time ActiveX control support let Sybase and other third-party developers build support for servers from KIVA, ChiliSoft, and IBM/Lotus Domino into upcoming versions. The product's team-development and security features are useful for delegating tasks to designers, programmers, and artists over the Internet or through an intranet.

PowerSite's strong implementation and even-handed support for ActiveX and Java will help developers take advantage of each component model's strengths. With PowerSite, Sybase is taking a page from Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" strategy and making it its own.

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Where to Find

PowerSite Enterpris
e 1.0............................$2995 

(requires Win32 and 16 MB of RAM for Developer
 Workstation; 32 MB of RAM for Component Manager)
Sybase, Inc.
Concord, MA
Phone:    800-395-3525
Phone:    978-287-1500
Internet: 
http://www.sybase.com

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PowerSite Enterprise 1.0 Ratings

Technology	*	*	*	*	*
Implementation	*	*	*	*
Key: ***** Outstanding, **** Very Good, *** Good, ** Poor, * Fair

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The Time Has Come for Design-Time Control

screen_link (37 Kbytes)

The DataWindow design-time control generates HTML and server-side scripts for application server/database interaction.

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Steve Gillmor is a consultant for Southern Digital, Inc. (Charleston, SC). You can reach him at sgillmor@southerndigital.com .