Four J stresses alternative to industry giants Like David taking on two Goliaths, 4GL development software vendor Four J believes it has a better idea than the industry’s primary development platforms, Java and Microsoft .Net.Four J’s Genero is an object-based unified development environment for building client, database, and server-independent business applications.Due to ship at the end of summer, the next generation of the company’s platform features an XML-based object presentation layer to ensure that interface development is separated from deployment. Developers in Genero can focus on business logic, according to the company. The company believes its 4GL-based platform, which is compatible with Informix 4GL and currently available as Four J’s Business Development Suite, is a superior alternative to Java and .Net.Company Chairman and CEO Jean-Georges Schwartz has particularly harsh words for Java, saying it has slowed down the development market rather than advancing it. Java also requires a lot of maintenance services, he said.“I say C# and Java are too complex to write business applications,” Schwartz said. Four J, which has U.S. headquarters in Dallas, offers an alternative that is simpler and more economical, according to company officials.But Sun Microsystems’ John Fowler, executive vice president of the software group at Sun, said the market already has spoken and adopted Java over 4GLs.“There’s been a lot of 4GLs … but none of them have achieved mass market adoption to have tools and capabilities around them,” Fowler said. Four J’s product features a simple, abstract language that can be used with any operating system, database, or algorithm, according to the company. It also features a virtual machine for executing byte code and supports interoperability with Web services via support of SOAP 1.1. Genero features an XML tree and applications can be modified dynamically at runtime.Genero will cost $400 per congruent user or $15,000 per CPU. Software Development