June 11, 2009

Iron Speed automates 90 percent of Web coding

According to Iron Speed co-founder Alan Fisher, Iron Speed Designer can generate 90 percent of the code for an ASP.Net site

Over the last few months, I've been looking at a number of development tools that purport to improve developer productivity. I'll eventually review them all in one massive roundup -- at least that's the plan.

Meanwhile, I'd like to report on a conversation I had a few days ago with Alan Fisher, chairman and co-founder of Iron Speed.

[ Martin Heller also offers a preview of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, as well as further highlights of Microsoft's IDE | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

IW: Alan, why did you create Iron Speed Designer?

AF: The basic idea is that data-driven applications are similar, but different. By looking at the database schema, we can automate the generation of the parts that are similar.

If you look at the way we do application development, it hasn't changed much since the 1980s; we're still writing one line of code at a time. We may write that line faster and better since our tools have improved a great deal, but we're still plodding along one line at a time.

After the experience of building Onsale, my partners and I realized that we had a code base of a million lines of code, but that only 20,000 lines of code (2 percent of the code base) were special in any way. The bulk of the application was moving data in and out of forms and databases and into and out of other systems. So if we could automate the generation of the bulk of the code, the 90-plus percent that's essentially the same from application to application, we'd realize a huge jump in programmer productivity and leave time for the programmers to work on the code that's actually unique.

We focused on Web applications, basically departmental applications that were being moved from Access or Excel to the Web. These have a lot of commonality, because they're structurally similar. They all have the same CRUD operations, and reporting, and maintenance, and workflow. What we did with Designer was to automate the common bits, the data entry and import and so on.

An additional benefit of this comes when companies use the tool for all their custom business processes. Suddenly, all the applications have the same look and feel, not just the same colors but also the same controls and placements. That helps the users to learn and use the applications.

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madmark 18-Jun-09 6:37am
Most all databases have the big four functions: 1) Enter Data 2) Display Data 3) Edit Data 4) Delete Data We handle this by simply having a template that implements all four functions and changing the database name/schema as required. 90% of the code is reused unchanged. Code automation is great, but our policy is to never write what you can copy. Development times are shortened because we leverage our debugged codebase. One of the problem with "automation" is that it just adds another layer of complexity to the development. 99% of the code written in our shop is done in WORDPAD. Fast, easy, universally available - no time spent relearning tools. It may sound simplistic, but it works. More important than code automation (and we've seen CRAPPY machine generated code - subroutine/function calls to a single line, etc.) is clear documentation. Define the schema in the header of the program, document EVERYTHING. All code out of our shop - reguardless of language - follows the same code structure: Program Title and Copyright Version history in reverse chronological order Prose description of program/module function Constant declarations Variable declarations Start of code - code executes straight down - only exceptions branch out Exception handlers Functions (listed in alpha order) Subs (listed in alpha order) We have strict rules for indentation and subordination - if you tape a listing on tractor feed paper to the wall you can SEE the subordination and breaks in the code from 20' away. This leads to clean, powerful code!

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