Borland International Inc. has begun alpha testing an object-oriented, Pascal-based visual development tool that it plans to launch by year’s end as an alternative to Visual Basic.

The tool, code-named VBK (Visual Basic Killer), is aimed at giving corporate developers a new tool to rapidly build applications and database front ends — a market in which Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Basic has thrived, said sources familiar with the software.

The tool supports Visual Basic VBX controls and features a notebook-style interface similar to Quattro Pro. A future version will include Borland’s database engine, sources said.

VBK works in much the same way as Visual Basic: Users create event-driven programs by