PHILADELPHIA—Software AG Inc. Tuesday announced the release of Version 6 of its Natural fourth-generation language (4GL) development environment for Windows, Unix and Linux.
Reston, Va.-based Software AG made the announcement at the XML Conference and Exposition 2003 here. Natural Version 6 enables developers to access XML documents in Software AGs Tamino XML Server without having to know an XML query language, the company said.
Bruce Beaman, director of enterprise products at Software AG, said Natural Version 6 represents “one way weve bridged our legacy products with our new products.” Natural supports both Software AGs Adabas legacy database solution as well as the companys Tamino XML database. Natural is installed in more than 3,000 enterprises, Beaman said.
Natural 6 features an expanded XML toolkit and supports Tamino via Natural Data Manipulation Language (DML), so that users can access Tamino XML documents without having to know XQuery or other XML-specific languages, the company said.
Meanwhile, “Weve been trying to position Natural on Windows as the main platform for development,” Beaman said. He said Version 6 of Natural contains a feature known as the Single-Point-of-Development interface, which enables Windows-based Natural developers to access Natural applications on Unix and mainframe systems, and to modify those applications.
“This is bridge between Natural on Windows and Natural on other platforms,” Beaman said. The company decided to emphasize Windows development as part of its mainframe modernization initiative.
“Were doing mainframe modernization and helping our customers upgrade their mission-critical applications that run on Adabas and connect them to XML and the Web.
In addition, Single-Point-of-Development supports Natural add-ons such as Natural Construct, Natural Engineer, Predict and Mainframe Navigator.
Software AG officials said Natural version 6 runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and SuSE Linux and Red Hat Linux.