Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 11/22/04 issue

Rapid, really

By S. Michael Gallagher, Special to GCN

New rapid application development tools are making Web development easier

Rapid application development in the 1990s was, generally speaking, a contradiction in terms.

Available tools usually tied de- velopers to a specific platform for deployment. Distributing and managing versions of an application was a time-consuming chore, as was keeping groups of developers in sync on a project.

Easy-to-use tools typically couldn’t scale well, or they required a steep learning curve. When widely deployed as desktop clients, they required additional network and server infrastructure. And it was difficult or impossible to move the applications to new platforms such as the Web.

While Web-based applications solved the problem of how to get applications to users and centrally maintain them, they presented new technical challenges for the tools needed to build and deploy them. Often, RAD applications had to be totally rewritten with another technology, such as Java or C++, before they could be put to high-volume use—and that was anything but rapid.

The whole reason for RAD is to escape the long cycle of traditional application development: gathering requirements, designing and building an application, and then delivering it to the end user. That cyclic approach, said Jeff Walker, founder of RAD tool vendor Tenfold Corp., is self-defeating.

“The whole notion of requirements is a flawed process,” he said. “I’ve never seen people come up with requirements that actually meet what people want. People don’t know what they want until you show them what you’re giving them. If you spend a year determining crappy requirements, you’ve wasted a year.”

Faster turnaround

RAD tools let developers come back quickly to users with a working application based on their requests, so they can quickly change their minds.

“If you have the ability to change the app in a couple of days and go back to them, after few times around the loop, you get an application that’s suitable,” Walker said.

Fortunately, a new class of RAD tools is making Web development easier and giving developers real enterprise-strength results. The main differences among the latest generation of RAD tools is how much of the programming code that forms an application they hide, and what form the applications take when they’re deployed.

More news on related topics: Enterprise Architecture, IT in Action, New Products / Technology