Four J's Development Tools
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Four J's Development Tools is an international company created in 1995 by Jean-Georges Schwartz to facilitate the task of developing future-proof, mission-critical business applications cost effectively.
With offices around the world it has a customer base of small, medium and large enterprises including Fortune 500 accounts across many industry segments including banking, city financing, defence, education, energy, emergency services, health, insurance, manufacturing, media, packaging, tax collection, telecommunications and transport.
Today, it designs, develops and markets Genero, a development and deployment environment targeted at programmers of business applications.
[edit] History
After being forced to redevelop his own application more than five times in the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Georges Schwartz decided there must be a better way to do things and set up Four J’s Development Tools to solve the problem.
An application generator was its first product in 1996, which quickly gave way to Business Development Suite, an IBM Informix-4GL compatible development tool.
Business Development Suite improved on the very popular IBM Informix-4GL by providing support for the much needed Microsoft Windows Server and Graphical User Interface. More importantly, it provided a hardware abstraction layer via a Virtual Machine which isolated the applications business and presentation logic from the surrounding device dependent environment. This meant that applications developed for Windows could be easily executed on a Linux or Unix platform and in a Java client without recompilation. In this way, the business logic remains intact while the surrounding hardware environment changes and removes the need to rewrite or recompile applications. Development time is hence minimized.
Informix signed an OEM agreement with Four J’s in May 1998 to market the product under the Informix Dynamic-4GL (D-4GL) moniker. This turned out to be a very successful relationship, renewed by IBM when they purchased Informix on 1st July 2001.
Four J’s went on to improve Business Development Suite by providing support for Linux, Java and Web user interfaces as well as opening up database support to Adabas-D, IBM DB2, MS-SQL, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Sybase.
In October 2003 Four J’s released Genero, a re-architected version of Business Development Suite using XML as its user interface foundation and able to create applications indistinguishable from those developed with MS-Windows based tools. In June 2006, it launched Genero db – a database based on the ANTs Data Server and compatible with Informix, MS-SQL, and Oracle.
