Emerging development models are poised to disrupt conventional application development. These new models are driven by several capabilities that are converging into accelerated delivery. When we combine instantly available cloud computing platforms with frameworks, widgets and API’s, delivery time is dramatically reduced.
Cloud based compute and storage prices are dropping rapidly. Startup technology companies are exploiting the capacity with several alternatives to application development tools:
- Microsoft has Project Siena which enables engineers to build modern applications using drag-and-drop visual tools with a programming model based on Excel type functions.
- Mendix used a model driven approach where the user defines what data needs to be stored and the tool generates the final application to support the model.
- Outsystems is also a model driven approach but they generate code for classic Java and .Net extensions.
- IBM created a new platform called BlueMix which is a Java environment with a large catalog of reusable components to accelerate integration work.
Sogeti did a very non-scientific comparison of the tools and here is what we found:
| Criteria | BlueMix | Mendix | Outsystems |
| Customer Support Model | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| Cross-Platform output | 5 | 4 | 4 |
| Team Dev Support | 3 | 4 | 3 |
| Enterprise Integration | 3 | 3 | 5 |
| Licensing Costs | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Learning Curve | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Deployment Model | 2 | 4 | 5 |
| Security Model | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| API Extensibility | 5 | 3 | 4 |
| Monitoring | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Total Points | 39 | 37 | 40 |
I know this has been said before but…these tools could change the software engineer role into a producer/consumer model. The change will definitely redefine application development into two key roles:
- Software Engineers – Low-level technical people who build frameworks, widgets and API’s of software.
- Business Engineers – high-level technical people who integrate and visualize the data using the “stuff’ built by the software engineers.
Regardless of which role you take, the end-result is the same, application delivery time is dramatically reduced. This change could be as disruptive for application development as the global delivery model was 15 years ago.