'Agile applications' is the new buzzword of the development world because of the recognition that core applications must have the potential to do more than simply meet current business objectives. They can no longer merely deliver value to organisations for a finite number of years.
Applications today, by contrast, must be developed flexibly so that they can quickly and easily be adapted to meet the changing needs of the business - no matter how often or how drastically these requirements change.
Obviously this is easier said than done, and there is no silver bullet to eliminate all the challenges associated with this goal. However, architecture has been developed to enable the development of agile applications - and it's catching on fast.
Agile by design
Applications today must offer support despite the rapidly changing environment.
Ben van Niekerk, application development specialist focusing on Compuware's development and integration solutions.
Developed by the Objects Management Group (OMG), Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) ensures enterprise application development meets modern day requirements. Not only does it ensure productivity gains, thus getting applications to market quicker than before, it also enables the development of extremely agile applications.
MDA enables developers to cope with changes in legislation or the business environment - without having to start from scratch.
Before we look more closely at MDA, let's look more closely at the drivers for such an architecture.
Application development has always boiled down to two concepts: time to market and maintenance. Businesses today need to maintain a competitive-edge to survive, and this is often best achieved by quickly introducing new services, via IT applications, to market. This must be done before the competition can do it.
Secondly, applications also often need to be adjusted to meet new demands or changes in legislation.
While it's vital for organisations to decrease time-to-market, it is even more critical that the application supporting their offerings is flexible enough to offer ongoing support. Applications today must offer support despite the rapidly changing environment. They must support high-level business objectives as well the technological environment - both of which are ever-changing.
MDA comes to the rescue by offering a framework to address these challenges. It has been shown to decrease time to market by up to 40%, and even more exciting, to reduce maintenance cycles by up to a staggering 70%. This obviously has huge impact on the financials and bottom line of companies running with huge application development projects.
There is not space here to adequately describe the entire architecture. For that, please visit www.omg.org.
Using MDA
A key concept within MDA is what is termed 'isolation of concerns' or the breaking down of enterprise applications into individual key areas. The architecture first creates business models, which are technology- and platform-independent and defined purely in terms of business requirements.
Only then, when the designer understands exactly what the application must do, are platform-specific models created.
A key focus of the architecture is on the re-use of resources, so the approach looks at different ways of matching and leveraging previous investment in people, processes and products. Only at the last stage is coding introduced.
Java, .NET independent
The architecture is completely technology-independent. So the argument around whether .NET or Java is better becomes irrelevant. Both offer value. And it no longer matters if applications are written in one or the other. The business model can be re-used so by simply changing the implementation pattern, the application can easily be ported into the other environment. This ensures companies will be able to move to whatever technology they may deem fit for the future.
Changes to the business can easily be incorporated. Should VAT decrease from 14% to 10%, for example, only one change needs to be made, and this then filters down.
Traditionally, all the steps of application model development have had to be done manually. Through the new MDA approach, however, and clever use of automation, up to 97% of the process can now be automated.
Many local companies are looking at model-driven architecture with great interest for future application development, recognising that they would be shortsighted not to consider it.
The model lends itself to outsourcing as well. The requisitioning company creates the intellectual property, and then passes this over to the third party for development.
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