omponent-based development is about to get easier with the introduction of multidimensional object-oriented frameworks that deliver nearly complete applications.
Template Software in Dulles, Va., plans to announce this month a major upgrade of its Template Componentware, including the company's Snap integrated development environment, that will incorporate this higher level of functionality.
Also this month, Oberon Software in Cambridge, Mass., will announce that it plans to join wi
th vendors of commercially available applications to break them down into components for the company's Prospero application integration tool. Oberon expects those applications to range from desktop software to enterprise systems. Denver-based manufacturing-systems vendor J.D. Edwards and Primavera Systems Inc., a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., maker of project-planning software, are expected to kick off the initiative.
Existing component-based tools still require developers to hand-code the vast majority of application logic. The moves by Template and Oberon are designed to eliminate much of that grunt work.
Iraj Dabbaghchi, Internet product manager for American Electric Power, is using a beta version of Template's Componentware 8 to build a system that automatically monitors the Columbus, Ohio, utility's power grid for outages and helps operators restore power in an orderly fashion.
"You're really working with partially completed applications," he says. "The architecture has already been decided for you. A lo
t of the infrastructure and bells and whistles are already there. So building an application involves nothing more than finishing it. It's like frozen food."
Advisory firm Gartner Group Inc. projects that the market for component-based tools and services, which totaled $500 million in 1996, will grow 50% this year and reach $7 billion in 2001. Most of the growth, says Gartner analyst Mike Blechar, will come in higher-level tools like those expected from Template and Oberon.
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omponent-based development is about to get easier with the introduction of multidimensional object-oriented frameworks that deliver nearly complete applications.
