Aldon Introduces Powertools Suite
Aldon has combined and integrated its Flex/Edit and Flex/Designer AS/400 programming tools into the Flex/Powertools for Windows suite.
Flex/Powertools integrates Flex/Edit’s code editing capabilities with Flex/Designer’s WYSIWYG environment for screen and report designing. The result is a more flexible product that allows developers to code in Flex/Edit and see the results on the fly in Flex/Designer, or vice-versa, to use Flex/Designer’s WYSIWYG interface, then see the underlying code in Flex/Edit.
“Ninety percent of the time, people will want to use Designer, but still there’s times when people will want to work with the code,” says Matt Scholl, marketing director of Aldon. Scholl compares using Designer with Edit to using a WYSIWYG Web design tool, but having the option to view and make changes directly to the source code.
Prior to the integration of Flex/Designer and Flex/Edit into Flex/Powertools, users had to deal with a more cumbersome process using the two tools together, whereby they had to continually save in one before going back to the other.
“Now whenever you make changes to a screen or report in Flex/Designer, you can see the changes live in Flex/Designer’s ‘Code Pane’ or view them in Flex/Edit,” says Scholl.
Rich Knechtel, software engineer for Lakewood, Colo.-based Centrobe (part of Electronic Data Systems), an enterprise customer management firm, has taken advantage of the Flex/Powertools integration in the development and maintenance programming he does for AS/400 call center applications.
“It’s nice that you can edit a display file source member in Flex/Edit, then open it in Flex/Designer and bring the source member right in there,” Knechtel says.