Draft:Oracle Developer 2000

Developer/2000, or Developer 2000 (D2K), was an IDE that bundled a collection of Oracle Corporation tools, primarily Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports, used to create graphical user interface.:

Developer/2000 was announced at the 1996 Oracle OpenWorld conference and included a set of tools designed to help programmers easily create enterprise web-enabled client/server software that uses the Oracle Database

At the time most programs were written in Third Generation programming languages, such as C/C++ etc. and creating visual applications required a lot of knowledge was hard to maintain, moreover connecting code to databases was not easy, and ODBC was still in its early stages and had poor support and performance.

At the same time, Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools such as Microsoft's Visual Basic and Delphi were gaining popularity for their ease-of-use and the speed in which they enabled developers to create graphic user interfaces

Developer/2000 included, amongst other tools, the Oracle Forms version 4.5 which was considered a significant change to the previous Forms versions

Using Developer 2000

Oracle Developer 2000 was not a single product but a suite of powerful, integrated tools. The core components of the suite were

Oracle Forms: This was the cornerstone of Developer 2000. It provided a powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating and deploying sophisticated data entry and query screens (forms) with minimal coding.

Oracle forms uses event-driven programming. The developer uses triggers to handle different data manipulation events, and add custom validation rules, and also call stored procedures.

The code is written in the PL/SQL language

Key features of Oracle Forms within Developer 2000 included:

• GUI Interface: A significant leap from the character-based SQL*Forms, it allowed for the creation of visually appealing and user-friendly applications with elements like buttons, checkboxes, and radio groups.
• PL/SQL Integration: Developers could embed PL/SQL code directly into triggers and program units within the form to handle complex business logic.
• Object Navigator: A hierarchical tool for managing all the objects within a form, such as blocks, items, canvases, and windows.
• Layout Editor: A visual editor for designing the layout of the forms.
• Property Palettes: A straightforward way to inspect and modify the properties of any object.

Oracle Reports: This component was dedicated to creating sophisticated and highly formatted reports from data stored in the Oracle database. Its main features included:

• Data Model and Layout Separation: This allowed for the independent design of the data query and the report's visual presentation.
• Multiple Report Styles: It supported a variety of report formats, including tabular, master-detail, and matrix reports.
• Integration with Oracle Forms: Reports could be seamlessly called and executed from within an Oracle Forms application.
• Web Publishing (in later versions): Release 2.0, in particular, introduced the ability to generate reports in HTML and PDF formats, enabling web-based report distribution.

Oracle Graphics: This tool enabled the creation of charts and graphs to visually represent data. It could be used to embed graphical data visualizations within both forms and reports, providing a more intuitive understanding of the underlying information.

Tools included within the Developer/2000 installation

The installation of Developer/2000 contained the following set of tools:

• Forms
• Reports
• Graphics
• Procedure Builder
• Query Builder
• Reports Builder
• Schema builder
• Translation Builder
• Open 2000 Interfaces
• Oracle Terminal

Operating System support for Developer/2000

Developer/2000 supported the following Operating Systems

• Microsoft Windows (NT + 95)
• Sun SPARC Solaris
• IBM AIX
• Compaq Tru64 UNIX
• HP 9000 Series HP-UX
• Intel SVR4 UNIX Systems
• PowerPC and Macintosh 68k
• OpenVMS
• Silicon Graphics (SGI) IRIX