InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 11, 1999
Enterprise RAD Tools: Can They Do The Job?
Many products fall short due to market immaturity, application complexity, and the growing needs of developersBy Alan Radding
pplication development managers are finding slim pickings as they hunt for comprehensive enterprise rapid application development tools. While some vendors, such as Symantec Corp. and Inprise Corp., are rushing ERAD tools to market, most of the ERAD offerings to date do only parts of the job. Unable to wait, enterprise application developers are meeting their needs with whatever tools work best at the moment.Download a list of "Tools With Enterprise RAD Capabilities" as a PDF file.
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"I'd like to see tool vendors apply drag-and-drop to enterprise development and automate the generation of IDL [interface definition language] stubs for Corba," says Eric Lear, a principal at Cinelight, a Los Angeles custom development shop. He also wants wizards that will automatically distribute pieces of the application.
Lear says he tested beta versions of Symantec's ERAD tool, Visual Café Enterprise Suite, liked what he saw, and is excited by Symantec's promises of things to come. Now it's a question of how much and how fast the vendor can deliver.
Enterprise-scale application development is difficult to automate. The critical business logic that resides on middle-tier servers is nonvisual, so it doesn't readily lend itself to the drag-and-drop approach of two-tier client-server RAD tools.
Also, the system heterogeneity that has plagued enterprise development in the past continues to complicate development. The system differences developers have to take into account when writing a distributed application are daunting. In a typical large corporate application, there are multiple flavors of Windows clients, multiple browsers, thin clients, fat clients, Unix, Windows NT Server, legacy systems, and multiple databases. And with the Internet and extranets, the issue of scalability goes right off the charts. In the real world, when Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Green- span sneezes, the core applications run by large financial institutions can suddenly experience a tenfold or even 100-fold increase in traffic.
New Tools Take Over
Despite the challenges, new ERAD tools are finally appearing on the market or will appear shortly. A team of Symantec and Platinum Technology developers, for example, has already used Visual Café Enterprise Suite to build an Internet-based inventory tracking system to be used by a company and its suppliers. Using Web components consisting of Java servlets, which are pieces of server-side application logic, the application lets users monitor the items they are responsible for in real time and analyze historical data stored in a data mart. The application can also project future demand.
The application uses Corba middleware to connect Java systems to Unix systems. The total development time was eight weeks, which is considered quite fast for a system of this complexity.
The quick turnaround was achieved by painting screens and interfaces and automating the creation of Corba IDLs through the use of wizards. A team management feature also allowed application debugging by a widely distributed team of developers. While the application has not yet been tested under high loads, the development team says the n-tier architecture should enable it to effectively scale.
Inprise also offers an ERAD tool, the Inprise Application Server. It consists of existing Inprise products that have been enhanced, and some new capabilities. The offering includes the JBuilder Java IDE--JBuilder for Application Server, the Visibroker Corba object request broker, the AppCenter distributed application management tool, and the Visibroker Integrated Transaction Service.
For RAD capabilities, Inprise provides visual IDL creation and automates the underlying communications coding, eliminating the need to know Corba. The tool suite also includes application management capabilities, which is unique in a product of this type.
NationsBank Corp., which has merged with BankAmerica Corp., opted for JBuilder, a key component of the Inprise Application Suite. The key selling point was the ability to design front-end applications graphically and generate the needed code. "All that's left is some connection work," says John Melka, senior VP of IS at Bank of America's Chicago office. Still, the new ERAD solution isn't magical, he warns. "These tools should be used to generate boilerplate code--the stuff you used to cut and paste from the command line." Melka says he still hasn't found a tool that automates the process of creating business logic.
Java Used Here
While the tool vendors rush to fill the gaps in the emerging generation of ERAD tools, most business developers continue to use lower-level tools, particularly Java, to build enterprise applications. Developers at Motorola Inc., for example, use Microsoft's Visual J++ combined with a library of Web-oriented Component Object Model components. They're also using Java Database Connectivity for the client-server database connectivity, Active Data Objects on the server, and Microsoft's Transaction Server to build a credit-card application.
The Motorola application, written completely in Java, takes credit- card invoice information from an Oracle database and automates processing and authorization. About 50 users currently use the application, but the number will likely rise to 500 users, says Motorola developer Shone Sadler.
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Illustration by Matt Foster
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