02.25.02
Making Things Easy for the Rest of Us
Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed a lot of the cool new products that have rolled out in run-up to Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET release. All of them, VS.NET included, have been designed to make complex application development tasks easier than ever before.
Our basic question: Is that such a good idea?
We posed this question a couple weeks back when we reviewed Rational’s new XDE UML modeling tool, which generates complex UML models while you code in VS.NET. For the record, we want to correct ourselves here: Rational wasn’t the first to offer UML support for .NET languages, TogetherSoft released such a product last fall.
Back to our point. The original idea of developing object models in UML language was to build reusable application frameworks before coders got to them. But these tools allow models to be generated as afterthoughts during coding. Will this get developers up to speed on object development or simply give them a weapon to become more dangerous?
Today’s BEA release of WebLogic Workshop brings up similar questions. BEA is trying to solve the problem that the richness of the J2EE framework, which made it the gold standard of web application development, also made it hard to learn. Even today, few developers have managed to tackle Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), arguably the brass ring of J2EE.
BEA WebLogic Workshop is developed like the old 4GLs, providing an event-based, visual approach to deploying sophisticated services like data caching, system failover, messaging, and transaction pooling. Admittedly, BEA has built many defaults into WebLogic Workshop to steer developers to making the right configuration choices. Will this help client/server developers master the intricacies of J2EE?
Why are we having this conversation? Even with the technology market downturn, skill shortages persist. Visualize the talent pool as a pyramid: on top is an elite cadre of enterprise architects, designers, and analysts who know enterprise business rules, the underlying plumbing of enterprise systems, and OO design. They remain highly paid and hard to find. Below them are throngs of lower-paid developers who code and can be bought by the dozen.
Similar questions arose a decade ago when Visual Basic opened up programming to liberal arts folks, allowing many companies to pry open the riches of their back end systems. Maybe it’s not a stretch to expect that the new tools could help client/server developers grow up, but we’re still keeping a wary eye.