By Claude J. Bauer
High Tech Careers Editor
Special Advertising Recruitment Supplement to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 26, 1998

According to industry sources, software developers are reaping the benefits of a new generation of rapid application development (RAD) tools that allow programmers to easily create scaleable Web-enabled applications. What's more, experts say the demand for high tech professionals with expertise in the RAD tools will likely increase in response to the productivity gains the tools are bringing to the market.

RAD tools help software developers create applications by allowing them to work in visual environments where they can drag and drop objects, assemble pre-built components, and link dialog boxes without having to create new code for every program function.

According to John Judge, practice manager for OfficeDevelopment [sic] at the Bethesda, Md.-based consultancy Virtualogic Inc., software developers are moving away from working with the "raw materials" of third generation languages (3GLs) and toward RAD tools. "We've seen much greater depth in RAD tools," he noted. "There's an overall desire among development vendors and clients alike to build applications with objects instead of bricks and mortar," he said.

John Zubeck, an independent consultant working on his Ph.D. in RAD software at George Mason University, adds that the notion of rapid software development holds great appeal for developers and customers alike. Customers want to get their new systems up and running as quickly as possible, and developers want to increase their productivity. As a result, RAD is "tremendously appealing," Zubeck noted. "People love it."

Defining RADness

For Jim Allen, director of advanced systems for SAIC Inc., a RAD tool is one that, "promotes and supports a high degree of reusability and allows the vendor community to build reusable modules." The key to RAD is not having to develop code from scratch, he said. Allen notes that his group relies on popular RAD tools Visual Basic 5.0 and Microsoft Visual C++ for development projects. He finds Visual Basic 5.0 "extremely fast for GUI development," and notes that when using Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ together, there is "very little, if any, throwaway code."

David Webber, a consultant with Elumen Solutions and an acknowledged RAD expert, adds, "RAD is not about just re-using old code, but how rapidly and seamlessly you can substantially modify components and transform them to meet new business needs."

Since 1994, end users and RAD vendors have worked with the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) consortium, based in Kent, England, to define, promote, and evolve a worldwide standard for RAD. Webber, who also runs an Internet user group focused on RAD, notes that, "The DSDM has even formalized RAD into an exact science, endorsed by the U.K. government for all its projects."

RAD Rebirth

According to Peter Jeffcock, senior product manager for Sun Microsystems, RAD tools also had to contend with the somewhat negative legacy of computer-assisted engineering (CASE), which was popular in the 1980s. "RAD tools take a particular area and do it well, while CASE tools try to do everything," he said. Jeffcock notes that while CASE tools can be very effective, they come with a steep learning curve. "Most people didn't see benefits [with CASE tools] until the second or third project," he said. Frustrated by that experience, many turned to RAD, only to find that RAD tools couldn't handle large-scale projects.

Starr notes that RAD tools have traditionally been viewed as quick-fix solutions for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and small database applications, rather than full- fledged, enterprise solutions. "That's the classic criticism of RAD," he said. However, he quickly noted that, "the tradeoffs are over." Today's RAD tools are more robust than their predecessors, and capable of tackling software development for large-scale projects, Starr maintains. "The stereotypes surrounding RAD tools are beginning to disappear," he said.

Market Leaders

PowerBuilder, from the Emeryville, Calif.-based Sybase Inc., has always enjoyed widespread popularity in the development community. The most recent release, PowerBuilder 6.0 Enterprise, includes RAD features such as the Component Factory, which automatically generates PowerBuilder objects as standard components. Steve Clark, vice president of Sybase's enterprise applications workforce, sees a "very strong demand" for workers with PowerBuilder skills. "It's still the leading development tool for creating enterprise applications," he said. PowerBuilder experience "brings a premium" to high tech workers, Clark said, noting that there are many opportunities available for PowerBuilder professionals.

King agrees, and adds, "PowerBuilder is a little bit harder to learn," than Visual Basic, which means certified PowerBuilder developers may command a higher hourly rate than Visual Basic developers. A certified Powerbuilder developer can earn up to $80 per hour, King said.

Visual Basic from Microsoft Corp. competes head-to-head with PowerBuilder in the software development arena. While Visual Basic has been available for six years, Caroline Duffy, Microsoft's marketing manager for Visual Basic, points out that, "Visual Basic 5.0 [the most recent release] is Microsoft's entry into the new RAD tool space." She calls Visual Basic 5.0, "The most popular development language by an order of magnitude," noting that Microsoft has licensed over 1 million copies of the product since its release last year. According to studies commissioned by Microsoft, 55 percent of software developers now use Visual Basic as their primary development tool, compared to 19 percent that use all versions of C++ and 5 percent that use Java. Visual Basic 5.0 now includes a native co-compiler that makes applications run "screamingly fast," Duffy said, up to 20 times faster than previous versions of the software, she said.

According to Judge, Virtualogic used Visual Basic 5.0 to create its flagship product, AssociationOffice [sic]. In fact, developing software with Visual Basic 5.0 has become "the hottest area for us," Judge said. "Visual Basic 5.0 is the obvious choice," when considering RAD products. "It has all the tools and depth we need," he noted.

Duffy also points to a thriving industry of ActiveX and COM component vendors that has sprung up to support Visual Basic development. Numerous small and large companies now offer catalogs that contain hundreds of pre-built components that programmers can simply plug into Visual Basic applications. Duffy estimates there are now upwards of 6,000 components on the market, with more being introduced daily. She believes a computer professional can't go wrong learning Visual Basic 5.0. "There's a lot of demand for Visual Basic, and a lot of Visual Basic programmers out there," she said.

King concurs, and notes that while there are many more Visual Basic developers than others, there is still a strong demand for their services. "Visual Basic is hot," King said. However, he also noted that it is easier to learn than PowerBuilder. Consequently, "There's more talent for Visual Basic [on the market] than for PowerBuilder," said King. The pay scale for Visual Basic developers can range up to $55 per hour, he said.

Magic Software Enterprises is another company making gains in the RAD tool market with its product Magic. According to Starr, today's emphasis on the Web, client/server computing, and legacy systems has forced developers to look at RAD tools that are capable of working across the enterprise. "We thrive in those situations," he said. Magic allows programmers to work with database tables through dialog boxes, rather than writing code. The company describes Magic as a "second generation RAD tool" that uses a totally table-driven approach to client/server application development.

Webber is using Magic to develop a large administrative application for a group of hospitals. It will run on a client/server platform over a Novell network and interface with an Oracle database. "In the past, RAD tools have been little more than code generators," Webber recalled. "Now, they're quite sophisticated," he said.

Productivity Benefits

Microsoft's Duffy believes RAD tools also contribute to productivity by allowing software developers to buy and customize software instead of building it from scratch. "Visual Basic's reason for being is to make programmers more productive and get applications to market more quickly," Duffy said.

Sybase's Clark adds that RAD tools such as PowerBuilder enable developers to be "much more productive" than when they write code using 3GL's. "The ramp-up time [for new employees] is less, and you can expand the resources that are working on an application," he said.

Web-enabling RAD

Thanks to the emergence of the Internet as a business platform and the popularity of technologies such as HTML, Java, Java Beans, and ActiveX, software vendors are now including RAD capabilities in their Web tools.

For example, Sun Microsystem's Jeffcock asserts, "Java Studio definitely has a lot of RAD aspects to it." With Java Studio, developers can assemble Java applets by stringing together Java Beans, Jeffcock said. Java Beans is "Java for the masses," he said, because it drastically simplifies the creation of Java applets.

In addition, Judge views Microsoft's Visual InterDev 6.0 as a RAD tool for creating web-enabled applications. Visual InterDev 6.0 allow programmers to quickly build, debug, and deploy Web applications. When combined with Visual Basic 5.0, Visual InterDev offers, "an incredibly compelling solution," for developers who are creating applications for the Microsoft environment, said Judge.