Background

Rapid Application Development was a response to non-agile processes developed in the 1970s, such as the Waterfall model. The problem with previous methodologies was that applications took so long to build that requirements had changed before the system was complete, often resulting in unusable systems. Starting with the ideas of Barry Boehm and Scott Shultz, James Martin developed the Rapid Application Development approach during the 1980s at IBM and finally formalised it by publishing a book in 1991.

Advantages and disadvantages

Rapid Application Development systems commonly have these advantages: increased speed of development and increased quality. The speed increases can be achieved using a variety of methods including, rapid prototyping, virtualization of system related routines, the use of CASE tools and other techniques. Quality, as defined by RAD, is both the degree to which a delivered application meets the needs of users as well as the degree to which a delivered system has low maintenance costs. RAD increases quality through the involvement of the user in the analysis and design stages. Some systems also deliver advanantages of interoperability, extensibility, and portability.

Early RAD systems had two primary disadvantages: reduced Scalability, and reduced features. Reduced scalability occurs because a RAD developed application starts as a prototype and evolves into a finished application. Reduced features occur due to time boxing, where features are pushed to later versions in order to finish a release in a short amount of time.¹

¹ from www.wikipedia.org

Cross Platform Rapid Application Development

As NXTware has evolved from its legacy Entera and NXTware middleware roots, eCube Systems has noticed that more and more of its clients still develop with legacy languages.  Since Unix developers have historically built their applications in a powerful, yet "waterfall" Unix environment with tools like vi, emacs, and make, Windows developers have not.  Most developers in a Windows environment think of an IDE as being a single GUI interface in which all development is done. This GUI provides typically large numbers of features for authoring, modifying, compiling, deploying and debugging software. The idea being that the IDE abstracts the configuration necessary to piece together command line utilities in a cohesive unit, which theoretically reduces the time to learn a language, and increases developer productivity.

Since many developers now use the Windows or Linux platform even if they are telnetting to a Unix box to do their server development, it makes sense that they might want an IDE to automate some of this development environment. Many of them still use RCS, CVS, make, vi and other unix tools to manage and develop software on Unix and use a separate JBuilder and Eclipse for their java applications.

NXTware IDE is a cross-platform Linux, Unix: (AIX, HPUX, IRIX, OpenBSD, Solaris), iSeries, OpenVMS, and Windows) and cross-database (ADABAS, CICS, DB2, IFS, Informix, MSSQL, Oracle, ODBC,  MySQL, Sybase, and XML) capable rapid application development and deployment tool.

NXTware IDE is a RAD based on the Eclipse platform, integrating and supporting the open source plugins for multiple languages including:

• C/C++
• COBOL
• FORTRAN
• Perl

With NXTware IDE, developers now have a cross platform and language independent RAD: one that works on Unix, Microsoft, Linux, and IBM Operating Systems, and handles COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, Perl, Basic, Pascal and many other current and legacy languages.  If you would like to find out more about NXTware IDE, contact us.