SW DEVELOPMENT: The Changing Toolkits

Among the many casualties of the Net age are traditional

toolkits. Today’s development is fast and furious, the apps Web-savvy, the

solutions prefixed with an e, and the language is Java.

Like ICE today, IDE was the buzzword for the late-1980s

developer. The "integrated development environment", first introduced

in Borland’s Turbo Pascal, was radical. Instead of separate "make",

"link" and "compile" command-line operations, following lots

of editing in arcane DOS editors such as Norton Editor and Brief, programmers

suddenly had a single package in which they edited, compiled, debugged and

created executables.

What a lot of change the development community has seen in 10

years. Rapid application development (RAD), object-oriented code, reusable

modules, full-life-cycle CASE tools, FreeBSD and OpenSource, community

development and Linux. You may not have heard much about this area if you’re

not right inside it, but it’s been moving as fast as the rest of IT.

Accelerated, in recent years, by the Internet, which has created a mass-market,

end-user genre: HTML and related tools.

The traditional development tools of the 1990s are giving way

to a new genre in the Internet age. As strategic business initiatives are turned

into rapidly-executed Web strategies, the demand for application development and

deployment software tools is increasing sharply. The focus of development tool

vendors is shifting from building tools for creating and deploying Windows-based

native apps to tools for the enterprise. And that translates into integrated

toolkits for e-applications.

The development-tools segment of the software market is

growing sharply. But the number of players in it is narrowing, thanks to mergers

and acquisitions. Here, you find the big names: Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle; and

some smaller ones like Borland, Rational Software and Fujitsu. IDC reports that

worldwide revenue growth in this market will average nearly 20% from $36.5

billion in 1999 to $90.2 billion in 2004. The Indian application development

tools market is also being driven by the Net, with Internet tools having the

highest growth of over 129% each year, says IDC.

As corporates rapidly increase spending on IT, enterprises

are deploying distributed, multi-tier, component-based architectures for e-biz

implementation. Component-based, cross-platform development environments that

can deliver end solutions for e-biz are becoming the norm for toolkit

manufacturers. This is pushing Java, EJB, Perl and CORBA into mainstream

development. Most of the newer products are RAD tools with Java or CORBA as the

base.

The future of business is about wireless and mobility, with

the Internet at the core. Appliances and mobile devices will connect to your

network: cellphones, pagers, palmtops. The mobile device will become a hub. This

will generate the need to have more native apps on those mobile devices. WAP is

at the helm of mobile e-commerce, and its roots lie in XML. This will need more

offerings from the vendors for the developers in this sub-segment.

In operating environments, Linux is the OS to watch.

Developers are still relatively few, for Linux has not yet become a mainstream

OS–but it’s a step away. IDC expects strong growth, especially in Linux apps

development and deployment, with average annual growth of almost 183%. But Linux’s

revenues will remain dwarfed by 32-bit Windows, says IDC, partly because the OS

is essentially free, forming the core for apps and services.

Targeting this high-growth market is Borland, with its

project Kylix–the porting of Delphi and C++ Builder to Linux, which will let

developers create native Linux apps in Delphi/C++ Builder as well as easily move

apps back and forth between Linux and Windows. With the acceptability of Linux

increasing as a desktop OS, more and more new developers will take up Linux, as

the need for native apps on Linux will increase.

Tools that are used to develop any kind of Web-related apps,

including security products, developing and deploying complete e-solutions for

the enterprises, Internet access software, and server and client-side software,

are going to witness maximum growth. Software configuration management and

database administration tool vendors will receive a big boost from e-biz as they

provide tools to ensure quality, scalability and changeability of e-biz

applications throughout their entire life cycle.

The worldwide market for application life-cycle management

tools is also growing rapidly, from $5 billion in 1999 to an expected $9 billion

market by 2004. Application life-cycle management products are defined as tools

that support the process of software application development and deployment.

E-com is becoming a major boost factor for this market too.

Products

Tools with Java at the base are growing the quickest.

Microsoft’s graphical development environments–Visual C++, Visual J++ and

Visual Basic–can create cross-platform Java applications and applets. Oracle

Designer, Oracle Developer and JDeveloper 3 are Java-based RAD environments for

creating Web-based, client-server apps, building e-biz solutions, and an

integrated development environment for designing and deploying component-based

Java apps, respectively.

Sybase’s PowerJ Enterprise is an enterprise-level Java

development environment. Power++ is a RAD tool that combines a visual,

component-based client-server development environment with C++. Borland has a number of products including VisiBroker, an engine for developing e-biz

apps based on CORBA, Jbuilder for building pure Java applications, and Delphi, a

RAD tool for Windows. IBM’s VisualAge for Java is a RAD environment for Java.

Iona’s ORBIX is a full and complete implementation of the Object Management

Group’s CORBA to develop distributed applications using object-oriented

client-server technology. Symantec’s Visual Cafe is a family of RAD

environments for Java. Sun’s Visual WorkShop C++ is an integrated environment

for C++ development on Solaris. I-Logic’s Rhapsody is an object-oriented

analysis, design and implementation environment for embedded systems developers.

Java’s big attraction is its cross-platform nature.

Cross-platform development software is a quickly emerging segment, which will

witness more players joining in. Growth in the application development and

deployment software segment will revolve around Web-centric software with e-biz

and m-commerce tools.

Taru Agarwal