Envelop Engine -- Envelop Engine is a Windows 95/NT Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool designed from the ground up to make developing and sharing object-oriented components as easy as possible. Envelop Engine is indeed truly object-oriented, providing polymorphism, object inheritance and encapsulation. You can build your own components and tools within the Envelop Engine, or you can customize and extend ones downloaded from the Envelop Web site. In addition to offering a robust 32-bit engine, Envelop includes support for the newest Microsoft tools, including ODBC, OLE 2.0, MAPI, and much more. What is truly most impressive about Envelop Engine is that the software is available entirely free of charge. Envelop seeks to harness the collective genius of the Internet to make the most powerful and robust programming environment ever. Their motto is, "If you can dream it, you can build it in Envelop," and rather than charging for the software needed to build that dream, Envelop believes in receiving compensation only when the developer does. In addition to the software itself, Envelop provides an electronic marketplace for a "meeting of the minds" where developers can meet, interact, and sale their objects and components. The goal behind maintaining a web site that fosters close collaboration between producers and consumers of technology is to thrive off of small transaction fees for objects and components sold over the Envelop web site and to economically benefit from the commerce that ensues. With an outstanding product freely available to users, it's hard to doubt that Envelop will have much trouble exceeding at its lofty goals. Pros: Tons of features, easy to use, extensive online help documentation, free of charge Cons: Extremely memory intensive, only available for Windows 95/NT users New: Setup and editing wizards; new samples, tutorials, tools, and more Version Reviewed: 1.3 Date of Review: 6/6/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud apps conference Main Menu