* Iron Speed Designer
The cost of a Web front-end for your database depends on how fast you can build it. Iron Speed’s Iron Speed Designer (link below), an application generator for .Net, is designed to achieve just that – rapid development and deployment.
Iron Speed Designer builds VB .Net and ASP.Net code from your existing database. To do this, you create a set of HTML “layout pages” that uses custom tags. Using Iron Speed Designer, you “bind” the database fields to the tags and add page controls, Web forms, filtering, sorting, navigation, searching, internationalization, data grids, and role-based security. Iron Speed Designer can then generate presentation and application layers along with SQL queries and stored procedures.
According to Iron Speed, the product works by “translating a declarative description (i.e., an HTML page layout) of your application into a working n-tier application. By allowing you to simply state what you want in terms of functionality and layout, Iron Speed Designer is particularly suited to an iterative style of development.”
The comment about iterative development is interesting because if there’s one thing you find when you are developing Web applications is that after the big development push and fixing the major bugs it is, in fact, a process of iterative tweaking that puts the polish on the finished application.
Interestingly, Iron Speed Designer is actually a Web application in itself based on the .Net framework 1.1. Implemented as an ASP.Net application and run from an IIS server, Iron Speed Designer works with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 7, Microsoft MSDE 2000 and Microsoft Data Access Components Version 2.6 or higher.
A 15-day fully functional evaluation version is available. A Professional Edition costs $495 and the Enterprise Edition, which includes advanced field validation, more templates, multiple database applications, and virtual foreign key support, costs $2,195. Support options are also available.
