|
Build Stunning Web Applications Quickly
Developing web applications provides an opportunity to build highly-creative,
user-friendly applications.
To most application users, web applications look better than traditional desktop applications, and they're also perceived as much easier to use. Web applications afford the opportunity to reach out to both internal and external users like never before, and many organizations are enhancing web applications to integrate customers and suppliers, in addition to internal users.
At the same time, building web applications put you, the developer, in a completely different scenario. Web-based applications add additional development burdens of security, stateless transaction management, pagebased navigation, as well as a variety of user interface features, that you wouldn't normally worry about in traditional desktop client-server applications. Even though platforms like the Microsoft .NET Framework deliver the basic OS-level services for these applications, you still must write SQL statements, create hundreds of web pages, and code the business logic.
Smart IT departments are efficiently conquering many of these critical issues, and focusing resources on creating intellectual property that's truly unique to their businesses. They are using a new breed of software tools called application generators to eliminate hand-coding of the infrastructure programming.
Application generation takes a giant leap forward, offering a broader, more comprehensive solution. Application generators such as Iron Speed Designer create a significant portion of your entire application for you, frequently as much as 80%-90% of the application.
Accelerating the development cycle without sacrificing performance, features and interoperability, are key benefits provided by application generation.
This white paper describes how one application generator, Iron Speed Designer, works. It uses an Iterative Drag and Drop development style most professional application developers find comfortable.
The Iron Speed Designer Approach
Imagine creating 80% to 90% of your application just by dragging components onto web pages in a visual editor. All of the components ? tables, panels, and controls ? are magically hooked up with each other and the underlying databases, and all the associated code is generated for you. That's exactly what Iron Speed Designer does, illustrating the power of drag and drop application generation.
Iron Speed Designer's approach to application generation is very straightforward:
1. Start with your application-specific data model ? an existing database or other data asset.
2. Automatically create a set of fully functional application web pages for common database operations, such as adding, editing and viewing data.
3. Quickly and easily construct web pages by dragging and dropping components ? a comfortable development style for most developers.
4. Generate everything needed for a functional n-tier application ? all the web pages, code and SQL ? and deliver a working, bug-free application.
5. Automatically generate "pure" source code in native .NET languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, which do not require proprietary runtime servers or libraries.
6. Generate complete and well organized source code that's easy to modify and extend.
7. Allow handmade code customizations to the generated application, automatically preserving them during subsequent application regenerations. Let's see exactly what we mean by drag and drop application generation.
Drag and Drop Application Generation
"Drag and drop" application generation recognizes that only a small percentage of the code in any application is the "secret sauce" ? the truly unique elements of business logic that differentiate one application from another. The vast majority of most web applications consists of fairly standard components ? tables, panels, and controls ? that lend themselves to being automatically generated and connected by an application generator. Only the unique application logic remains to be written by hand.
A brief example illustrates this point. Suppose you need to build an order entry system that allows sales people to create, edit and retrieve sales orders. This application might have an input form for adding and editing orders and a table page for displaying orders for any given customer. Using drag and drop application generation, the developer drags tables (data grids), fields and other components onto web pages and then selects the appropriate mapping between the underlying database and web page components. When ready, the developer lets the application generator produce the underlying application source code and SQL, including code for all of the web pages, controls, and database connectivity infrastructure.
Applications like these lend themselves well to application generation because they use typical database connectivity and application infrastructure.
|
