Fast Development Rules!

[Brovin Yaroslav]

Speed is king in tech, right? Few will disagree that today fast development should be more critical than ever. You not only need to develop quickly, but work closely with business partners to get your apps right. If you are not fast, someone else will get there. If you do not get it right, well then it won’t work. I read somewhere that the average app on iTunes today has close to “0” probability of download - yikes!

I frequently ask myself, why we have struggled in the last decade with the object development and fast development messaging. The RAD methodology maybe old, but RAD tools work amazingly with agile methodologies – better than most, since iterations are very fast and easy.

I personally see several major trends that crushed the perception of RAD and frankly, they have nothing to do with Delphi. Although, let’s face it, the large players never had a reason to particularly like Delphi.

The strategy across US to consolidate tech on standard web friendly architecture stacks made Java dominant. If you had to choose one, the default was clear, and .NET was the alternative if you loved MS. Then came “body-shop” outsourcing at scale. No one was interested in true efficiencies – it is all about cost and scale. Giant Indian companies were born with no clear model to support anything but “body-shop” outsourcing. Suddenly people cared far less about fast and only about cheap. Which “body-shop” in their right mind would want to build something with a RAD tool where one developer can do what five could otherwise? This perpetuated itself. Today, RAD is used by ISVs and customers that really value efficiencies, and even they get influenced by “body-shop” outsourcing trends.

The good news is that fast is back! There are too many large failed projects and bad software out there. What appeared cutting edge Java based architectures are now more difficult to maintain than COBAL. Acceptance for multi-platform development is higher than ever. We no longer live in a single stack architecture world. It is simply not feasible. Advances in DevOps are making heterogeneous deployment and management easier than ever.

I feel great about our RAD Studio and RAD Server as a super-fast and affordable way to develop enterprise grade applications. It keeps true to the spirit of easy and fast with added openness in deployment options as Windows is no longer the only supported infrastructure. You will very soon build to both Linux and Windows, deploying on any cloud you want!

We are starting to develop more industry solutions to serve as templates on which you can build. For example, we have a dramatic number of Healthcare clients and the PM team has an awesome Nursing Station Solution. Using the same approach, we are building other templates that can potentially transform development from months to weeks. They all use components, but now the components are more and work on Linux too. We plan to do a lot more of these to showcase the ease with which you can develop true multi-tier solutions with a small highly efficient team.

Fast Development Rules!

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