Cast neatly manages software changes

Imagine you've just been assigned the task of implementing a relatively innocuous change to an existing client/server application.

The less-than-comprehensive source-code documentation leaves you with unanswered questions, and because the application was developed years ago, the original programming team is nowhere to be found. If this sounds familiar, I would recommend an evaluation of Cast Software's Cast Workbench 3.74.

By parsing source code and mapping interactions between objects, Cast Workbench reveals the impact of a proposed change to client/server applications.

It comprises several independent client- and server-side components that access a common data dictionary repository installed on Microsoft's SQL Server.

The Cast Workbench repository is a storehouse for your application objects and interdependencies. Cast Workbench parsed several of my test applications rather quickly, given their intricacy, and it accurately identified tables, stored procedures, triggers, and views and added them to the repository. On the downside, if you are using third-party tools to make structural changes to your database objects, you will need to rebuild the repository to keep your models updated.

I found some small interoperability issues between Cast and SQL Server, and it could benefit from additional language-specific parsers, such as Java. However, I found Cast Workbench to be an effective tool.

Newly added support for remote repositories and document-management capabilities for team-devel-opment environments make this product worthy of enterprise-level consideration.

Cast Workbench offers an effective means of assessing the impact of modifications to your client/server applications, giving developers the insight necessary to avoid costly coding errors. the bottom lineCast Workbench 3.74Summary: This suite of database development tools from Cast Software provides client/server impact analysis of your source code and its object dependencies.

Business Case: Large-scale development environments will benefit from improved documentation and the ability to avoid the costly mistakes resulting from incomplete source-code analysis.

Price: An evaluation version is downloadable from the Web site.

Cast Software http://www.castsoftware.com

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