Abstract
Forté is a middleware designed during 90s as an advanced development environment for building, deploying and managing high-end client/server applications. It supports object-oriented development with a 4GL (Fourth Generation Language), a Graphical User Interface (GUI) screen designer and a multi-user development repository. It offers specific advantages in three areas – environment independence, advanced application functionality and mission critical support. The take over of Forte by Sun Microsystems and subsequent emergence of Java has reduced the future releases of Forte. With various Web servers in the market, the popularity and development ease of Web based n-tier application has significantly changed the application development scenario.

With changing market trends most of the developers also upgraded and moved onto the emerging skills, which resulted in shortage of Forte knowledgeable developers and technical architects. Also the number of new releases and additional features to the product itself has reduced drastically and soon may hit a road block in terms of future technical support. In this scenario, companies having their critical applications running on Forte might need to work out a roadmap for migrating to the newer technologies. This white paper addresses the history of Forte, its strong points and current challenges.

Authors Chandramouli Vaidyanathan Ramu Rayapudi

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