Have It Your Way

Program generators can allow you to be your own best source for software.

When Michael Rahman says "there's no need to sit in an office to do business anymore," he ain't just whistling Dixie. Rahman, who as president of AmericAir International Inc. consults worldwide for companies in the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) industry, is as likely to be knocking out reports on his Hyperion portable computer in a lounge at Tokyo's airport as working out of his home office in Winston-Salem, N.C. In fact the multilingual Rahman gives new meaning to the term "on the road." Since 1979, he has made 11 world tours and visited more than 50 countries for his clients.

As might be expected, Rahman has a lot to keep track of, not the least of which is his crucial list of global contacts. "I know a lot of people worldwide," he says. "But to find them at the opportune moment [isn't always easy]."

To create and maintain an up-to-date file on these individuals, he could have selected from dozens of software packages that are designed to organize and manage information. Instead, he invested in Next Step (Execuware, a division of Aeronca Inc., Charlotte, N.C.; $345), one of a handful of packages known as program or application generators that allow users to design their own software -- even if, like Rahman, they have no programming knowledge whatsoever.

Program generators have long been a part of the mainframe and minicomputer scenes, where, early on, the huge costs of developing custom software fueled a demand for an easier way to write the application packages that users needed to get a job done. Then about two years ago, someone had the idea of developing program generators for microcomputers.

No longer, went the rationale, would people need to rely on whatever products software developers offered. Nor would they have to learn a new set of instructions for each package they purchased. Instead, for one price, they could simply create the programs they wanted.

As good as the idea sounds, the concept nearly fizzled. "Program generators have gotten a bad rap in the industry," admits John McCloskey, general manager of Execuware. Much of the unsavory reputation of this type of software can be traced back to the inauspicious introduction of the first generator -- known as The Last One (distributed by BSI, Blue Sky Software, Cherry Hill, N.J.; $495). The package, its developers promised in splashy full-page ads, would be the only program a user would ever need.

"They claimed to do everything but change the baby," says Jules Gilder, former editor of Microcomputer Software Letter (Newsletter Management Corp., Boca Raton, Fla.). When the product finally appeared, nearly one year after its initial announcement, most novices found writing applications time-consuming and difficult. And even seasoned programmers had trouble altering their programs, since The Last One generated code -- the line-by-line instructions that tell the computer what to do -- -that was difficult to understand. "It just disappointed everyone," says Gilder.

Today, there are only about a dozen program generators on the market -- compared to around 80 word processing packages for the IBM Personal Computer, for instance. They cost from less than $70 to nearly $700 and vary considerably in both ease-of-use and sophistication. Some allow users to produce everything from graphics to spreadsheets to word-processing packages. But most, like Next Step, are limited to database applications. Most work in much the same way. Users answer a series of English-language questions or select items from a menu. When they have finished responding, the generator produces a program that is tailored to their requirements. The programming code can also be displayed easily, so more experienced users can further refine their software. (While in principle the code could be in any programming language, most of the microcomputer program generators use Basic.)

For those who have programming experience -- or access to someone who does -- the packages have obvious appeal (as long as they generate perfect code). "Instead of having to write 5,000 lines of code, you have to write only the 500 that are specific to your application. That's a hell of a time saver," says Al Tommervik, publisher of Softalk magazine.

Besides finding that it saved him time, Lee Hoffman, president of PhilanthroTec Inc., a seven-person, Laguna Hills, Calif., company that specializes in software for analyzing estate planning, literally formed a part of his business around a program generator. When Hoffman got Next Step, he was looking for software that would be easy for his clients to use and would calculate, from a series of complex government tables, the value of a tax deduction when a donor places an asset into a charitable trust. He had already developed for his customers, including charities, attorneys, and accountants, a sophisticated SuperCalc model that allowed them to enter a deduction's value, combine it with other variables, and figure out for their clients the optimal way to establish a trust.

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