DeKlarit

DeKlarit Review

John Luo

DeKlarit is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool for building database applications in a Visual Studio .NET IDE. It offers developers an environment to define your basic data definitions or schema and uses these definitions to create database objects, ADO.NET data components, and support forms. It automatically creates and maintains a normalized schema as well as generates ADO.NET strongly typed Datasets and Data Adapters.

The latest version 2.0 of Deklarit generates C# and Visual Basic .NET code and supports SQL Server 7.0+ and Oracle 8.17+.

There are two ways to generate the application. The first is that the users create Business Components which describe real life entities such as customers, products, orders, invoices, etc. through a simple forms-based interface within VS.NET. Deklarit will automatically normalize the entities, create table schema and created the database when you reorganize the database. After creating a new database Deklarit generates the Datasets and Data Adapters. It can also generate Windows application forms (GUI), Web application (ASP.NET) and Web Services. Using an ODBC to get the existing database schema, the second way will do the same job as the first by Reversing Engineering an exist database. This will benefit a lot to the established database developer.

Deklarit has a lot of features I like very much. For example, if I modify the schema Deklarit will automatic reorganize my database and regeneration the code for me. I don’t need to worry about modifying the data layer code. It is well structured and the code is almost error free. A lot of validation code is built in. Deklarit even calculates the length of controls (e.g. text box) by the length of the column in the database and display the length on the forms. It also validates the maximum length before you go to database and save the round trip to database. All foreign keys can be displayed as search buttons. It does save me tons of time. Deklarit also has a wonderful support team. They answer our questions right away on their news group.

There are a few features I disagree in the reverse engineer part. For example, I haven’t found a way to keep my unrelated attributes (but same column names) residing in more than one table in an existing database from renamed.

Over all, Deklarit is a great .NET tool product to have. It not only can save your developing time but it is also a very good start point to learn the .Net structure and coding skill. Recently it has been selected as a eWeek Excellence Award finalist.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,922903,00.asp