Application Development Strategies

Microsoft established an early lead in Web service development, with its Visual Studio .NET product, but Java-based tools have now narrowed this gap, and both platforms are actively used for developing Web services-based applications.

One of the key findings of this Report is the concept of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) within Application Development Strategies, where a design model can be developed that is independent of the platform on which the final application will be deployed. This can then automatically be used to generate a model that is specific to the relevant platform, thus much of the necessary code is automatically generated. It is our belief that this concept will revolutionise Application Development, particularly at the enterprise level. Problems will arise in the level of modelling skills available - lead developers may need to become modelling specialists to take full advantage. Even so, 100% code generation is not a realistic aim, and the objective of MDA is not to de-skill developers, but to improve productivity.

Market Issues

Microsoft, IBM, OracleOracle, and Borland between them have the lion's share of the market, but it is a market where there are still a large number of players. Many vendors provide solutions that cover the whole application lifecycle, and many more focus more tightly on the actual development environment. There has been considerable consolidation of the market, with major vendors acquiring more tools to provide full support for the application lifecycle. Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de

Open source tools for building applications are becoming increasingly popular, with many large vendors investing significant amounts of time in these initiatives, but the absence of support to the levels demanded by enterprise users has meant that open source-based development has not had the expected impact on the market. An open source offering can provide a basic toolset for development for small- and medium-sized organisations, with added functionality provided by tools that plug into an open source framework such as Eclipse.

In terms of the ongoing infrastructure debate - the J2EE versus .NET 'battle' - Butler Group continues to believe that both platforms will coexist within the majority of enterprises, and this makes it particularly important that model-driven architectures, and Web services-based development are used to successfully incorporate both into an overall enterprise architecture.

Microsoft has set its sights on the enterprise market with its .NET strategy, but as yet we do not believe that it has delivered on its promise, and the lack of a current MDA capability is a serious drawback, although there are clear indications that this gap will be plugged in the future. As a contrast, Compuware's active support for the MDA concept is starting to pay off, and the company has a winning strategy.