SYMBIANT easyGen 2.1 review

If the prospect of learning PHP or ASP fills you with dread, yet you want to build a website that does more than just share your holiday photos, Symbiant's easyGen 2 could be just the software you're looking for.

Billed as "your personal programmer in a box", easyGen takes over all the hard work of managing your data and integrating it with your site via dynamic web pages. Using only wizards and menus, you can create anything from simple login pages to full-blown e-commerce sites and the databases that drive them, with no programming knowledge and without ever looking at a piece of code. But that's not to say easyGen isn't for professionals. It was originally designed as an in-house tool to help Symbiant's own developers build customers' websites more quickly.

One of the many tutorial examples included with the program details how to construct a members' site with restricted-access web pages in an estimated time of under five minutes. We found that estimate to be quite accurate.

You don't have to start from scratch, as you can also import your existing sites and databases and work on them with easyGen. By exporting in either ASP or PHP, your site can be compatible with both Windows and Linux-based hosting, with either MySQL or OLE databases such as Access or SQLserver as the back-end. All you need to know is which systems your hosting provider is using, although you don't actually need to understand how they work.

Because easyGen avoids dealing with programming code up until the project is exported, you don't have to commit to using ASP or PHP before you start. Then, once your site is up and running, if you change hosts and need to swap between the two you can regenerate your site easily in the new language.

Although a full web page editor is included, easyGen's focus is on generating scripts and databases rather than on page design. Therefore designing is still best suited to products such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Microsoft's Frontpage. EasyGen will integrate with both of these products to allow you to make use of their advanced editing capabilities.

There's a wealth of documentation and help with topics such as database concepts introduced from beginner level. The step-by-step tutorials get you started immediately and will see you through to building complex sites in a surprisingly short time.

To start building a site, you just fill in a few details about your hosting arrangements and then start creating your pages using wizards, or import your own. When you have decided what data you want to gather - for example, usernames and passwords - easyGen will construct a database for you and link it to your pages using plain English.

If you're just looking to move your website beyond static pages or you want to build and manage a sophisticated corporate web presence then easyGen can help you do it without you having to learn programming or hire a developer. It could pay for itself in hours.