Back to the Future Again -- From the Fourth Generation to the Third, Part I

by Ken Orr

One of the interesting dilemmas facing current IT development managers is what to do with the applications that were written in what used to be referred to as 4GLs (fourth-generation languages). In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of such languages were developed that were designed first to handle management reporting tasks and then to develop basic PC and client-server applications. A key characteristic of these kinds of development environments is that they were based on a specific database. Over time, most of these tools gravitated to one or another relational database management system, or RDBMS (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.). The hallmark of these tools is that they did many things for you. Among these 4GLs were tools like Oracle Forms and Microsoft Access (which included its own RDBMS).

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Back to the Future Again -- From the Fourth Generation to the Third, Part IThu May 01 08:20:13 CDT 2008