Review: CodeCharge Studio

CodeCharge Studio 2.3, starting at $139.95
YesSoftware
Las Vegas, Nevada
(888) 241-7338
http://www.yessoftware.com/products/product.php?product_id=1

Every application is different, but as you build applications, you'll start to notice similarities. An awful lot of line of business applications these days, for example, are basically concerned with shoving data from a database to a Web interface, editing it there, and moving the edited data back to the database. If building such applications is your business, CodeCharge Studio will do most of the work for you quickly. Really quickly. As in, "go from the database to the finished application in five minutes" quickly: point their Application Builder at your database, make decisions on things like which tables to include and whether you want search forms, grids or lists, and which template to use for visual styles, and press the button - you're done.

If that was all there was to the product, CodeCharge Studio would be a great help in bootstrapping you to a starting point. But the starting point leaves you in the CodeCharge Studio IDE, where you can proceed to edit and tweak the generated application to your heart's content. It's trivially easy to do things like change labels and modify colors, of course. It's also simple to change a textbox to a dropdown control (just pick the new control from the shortcut menu) and then hook it up to a lookup table - the property sheet for the control makes the settings obvious if you've worked with practically any RAD environment from VB 1.0 onwards, and the dialog boxes for filling things in are well-designed, with appropriate data previews throughout. Want to add even more to a particular form? Try the Builders section of the toolbox, which gives you shortcuts to things like editable grids or popup date pickers, each leading to their own little wizard.

There's also a full HTML forms designer and, if you feel the real need to tweak things, you can get right down to the underlying HTML. At any time, it's easy to preview the results of your work, either in the IDE or by rebuilding and pushing the results to your actual Web server (well, you should probably be using a staging server, but you know what I mean). Other features you'll find here include a completely integrated security system (so you can easily build authentication into your sites, and control which users can get to which pages and functions, at a very fine-grained level), a FrontPage add-in mode (giving you access to the CodeCharge tools within the Microsoft FrontPage environment), and a batch of custom code snippets already included.

One very interesting thing about the product is that it's technology-agnostic. You get to decide when you design a new site whether you want to be working in ASP.NET (C# and VB), ASP 3.0, PHP 4.0, Java Servlets 2.2, JSP 1.1, ColdFusion 4.01, or PERL 5.0 - it will generate code for any of those environments. There are a batch of examples in the box (things like bug tracking and a basic portal) to get you started. CodeCharge comes in two editions - the $139.95 Personal Edition is limited to 100 pages and 1 data connection per site and has some other technical limitations; the full unlimited edition costs $279.95. You can download a trial from their Web site to play around with.

Some people hate the whole idea of RAD products; they want to see every line of code in their applications come from their own work at the keyboard, and hate the thought of having code written for them. If you're one of those people, then this is definitely not the product for you. But if you find yourself building search and grid and list HTML forms over and over again, and don't need to do a lot of heavy site customization, you might well find that CodeCharge Studio lets you work more efficiently and deliver more features for less cost. That seems like a win to me.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.