Borland is launching application development tools for non-programmers who want to offer live data on an intranet or Internet server. Daniel Cheng, Borland's regional product manager in Hong Kong, said IntraBuilder, released this month, was targeted at companies wanting to publish live data that could be accessed by a Web browser. Mr Cheng said the product's technology had been fine-tuned in the development of Delphi and Visual dBase, the object-oriented programming resources that generate most of Borland's revenue. 'This is for the power users in an office or a company who are not necessarily from a programming background,' he said. 'Anybody with a strong interest in data and computing can very quickly publish their data with IntraBuilder. 'At the back end, Borland has done everything for you, so you don't need to know HTML [hypertext mark-up language] or JavaScript.' Mr Cheng said IntraBuilder was positioned as a rapid application development environment for Windows 95 and Windows NT users, although the resultant applications can be deployed across different platforms, including Macintosh, Unix and Windows. It offers an object-oriented program-building environment but is designed to straddle both Netscape and Microsoft Web server application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as the neutral CGI API. IntraBuilder is available in three versions and is bundled with a number of original equipment manufacture software products, including Netscape's Navigator Gold 3.0 browser. The base model IntraBuilder will have a list price of US$99.95. It contains IntraBuilder, IntraBroker for CGI Web servers, Borland's database engine, Navigator Gold version 3.0 with an HTML page designer and a Web server for Windows 95/NT which can run on as little as 16Mb of memory. The next level of the product is IntraBuilder Professional, which includes a more sophisticated set of drivers for data retrieval; IntraBrokers for CGI, NSAPI and ISAPI for all Windows Web server interfaces and a full version of Netscape FastTrack Server, which incorporates Navigator Gold. It will have a list price of $499.95. The high-end IntraBuilder Client/Server box includes IntraServers to enable multi-tier application development for Microsoft's Windows NT Servers and NT Workstation. It will have a list price of $1,999.95. Borland said the product would sell well in the basic and professional editions, given that few rival products were prominent in the Hong Kong market. Other intranet development tools are offered by software developers such as Allaire, Bluestone, Corel, Macromedia and Haht.
