Johannesburg, 20 Nov 2003
Architected rapid application development (ARAD) is being hailed as a key solution to solving the challenges of e-business on demand. Trevor van Rensburg, business unit manager at Software Futures, discusses the advantages and opportunities offered by this new wave.
The rapid rise of Web services and the concurrent need to deploy existing mainframe systems and enterprise services to the Web and beyond highlight a need for scalability, agility and an on-demand delivery capability that is more often than not beyond traditional in-house application development teams.
Gartner has identified trends in methodology which have shown organisations moving from traditional waterfall structured analysis and design approaches to iterative, incremental processes and business process analysis (BPA) methodologies.
These trends, according to the research house, are continuing as organisations evolve toward service-oriented architectures such as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and .NET, which require a better understanding of business process flow and object orientation for effective implementation in OO languages, such as Java and C#.
Worryingly, Gartner recently reported that 75% of all non-trivial Java-based projects fail - mainly due to developer skills - and that the time to productivity for RPG, COBOL JCL, and other legacy programmers to skill-up for J2EE can be as long as 12 months, at a significant cost to companies. Of these trainees, the research house says, one third will not make the transition.
It is also estimated that the average cost of developing an enterprise Web application is between $1 million and $12 million, with 80% of the cost being labour.
The above gives an indication of the limitations of conventional techniques in the on-demand environment. There is, however, a new and powerful alternative - architected rapid application development (ARAD).
Typified by IBM Rational's latest application development tool, IBM Rational Rapid Developer, ARAD is best described as a RAD that has matured to meet the needs of development teams tasked with creating enterprise-class applications for on-demand business - without extensive J2EE re-training.
It provides a unified environment that encompasses the needs of all development team members - project leaders, analysts, programmers and architects - while comprising the elements essential to software development success.
Rational Rapid Developer surpasses traditional RAD offerings in its support for the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and model-driven development, its ability to facilitate integration with legacy enterprise and business-to-business systems, its use of pre-built patterns for deploying scalable n-tier J2EE applications and its modified version of the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (RUP is a framework of best practices for building applications that can help companies organise and run a software development project and schedule deliverables).
In short, ARAD combines the benefits of RAD with the benefits of good architectural design. Using Rational Rapid Developer, development teams can deliver on-demand applications in less time and at a lower cost. Team members with valuable business domain and legacy skills, but limited knowledge of J2EE, can be trained quickly to become skilled n-tier developers.
They can deploy applications with high scalability and performance, and with the flexibility to mix and match technologies as well as adapt to new ones. The repeatable ARAD process helps developers deliver applications with predictability and a high rate of success.
Gartner has confirmed that there is no better way to improve productivity, reduce cost and ensure scalability and performance of applications, while at the same time instilling methods that are "minimally invasive".
"ARAD should prove to be a near-ideal approach to balancing speed and cost with 'just enough' application quality and performance," the research house says, adding that it expects the ARAD approach to eventually represent between 45% to 55% of the application development portfolio.
The take-up of ARAD in SA is expected to be particularly rapid due to the skill shortage, the current move in both the corporate and public sectors towards Web services and, importantly, the urgent need to train developers from previously disadvantaged backgrounds.
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