Whatever happened to Rapid Application Development?
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gulchgoersf wrote:
Is RAD even possible anymore?
Oh, definitely. There are three key steps to developing an application rapidly:
- Know what needs to be done. This should be obvious, and i almost just left it out... but, yeah, if you don't know what you'll need to end up with before you begin, then you can't expect to finish quickly. Iterative development isn't a bad thing, and RAD may form the first, prototyping stage of it... but if you just need a tool cobbled together by this evening, waiting on other people to test and evaluate ain't gonna cut it.
- Know how to write software. The first key to RAD is knowing that you can re-invent the wheel if pre-packaged wheels will take too much time for delivery. It gives you leverage, especially combined with
- Don't chase every ball MS throws. You're a developer, not a dog - if you can get the job done faster using ASMX, or ASHX, or a custom HTTP server, or carrier pigeons... then do it. I have it on a reliable source that WCF rocks... but until you have had the time to learn it well enough to be fast using it (i haven't) then write what you need using what you already know.
That's it. Know what you need, know how to get it, don't get distracted.
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You're right. These facts that you've laid out totally contradict the wild ramblings that I pulled off the back of cornflakes packets.
Shog9 wrote:
Don't chase every ball MS throws. You're a developer, not a dog - if you can get the job done faster using ASMX, or ASHX, or a custom HTTP server, or carrier pigeons... then do it. I have it on a reliable source that WCF rocks... but until you have had the time to learn it well enough to be fast using it (i haven't) then write what you need using what you already know.
That's really good advice. I've been trying to tell that to developers for years but everybody is so caught up in using the latest "cool" gadget that they have forgotten how to think on their own. I'm all for progress but I often wonder how we can continue to develop stable applications when the toolset changes like I change shirts! Fortunately - at least a *little* bit of sanity is setting in to our shop. We've standardized on VS2005 for any of our web stuff (we still have a large base of code that's in VB6) and after getting rid of our "architect" we've stopped just upgrading tools just because they are "cool". Don't even talk to me about VS2010. -CB :D
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Is what you are building more like a treehouse or more like a nuclear power plant? If you are building a tree house go agile/RAD If you are building a nuclear power station go with up front design and proven engineering If it lies somwhere in between so should your solution
'--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
Duncan Edwards Jones wrote:
If you are building a tree house go agile/RAD
because when your treehouse collapses it'll only maim/kill your kids and a few of their friends instead of your family, your friends families, your neighbors, their families, etc etc etc. :doh:
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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Every interview I did when I used to do interviews ( that is, as a person being interviewed ) I would say in response to 'what is OO for', 'well, in theory you can reuse the code, but no-one ever does, and over-engineering to build reusable code every time is kind of stupid'. I've been offered a job by everyone who has ever interviewed me, I believe. I can say for sure that every time I've said that, it got a good laugh.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. "Iam doing the browsing center project in vb.net using c# coding" - this is why I don't answer questions much anymore. Oh, and Microsoft doesn't want me to.
When you make multiple derived classes, you're reusing the code of the base class. In MFC if you use a CWnd-derived class, you're reusing thousands of lines of code. Many design patterns (such as Visitor) use OO structures to reuse code. In the pre-OO days, this degree of reuse was rare except if you were using a library. OO technology has made reuse so common we sometimes forget we're doing it.
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Good to see Don Box and DevelopMentor sold you the coolness..industry keeps crushing the dollars. You can control both the 'error handling' and 'link time-out', you just need to dig in deeper. As for WCF, it sings on very similar and sad lines.. and my word is it a pain. Not only is it bloated on start-up and first communication hits which can feel slower than CP when its busy. Duplex channels are crap at performance, config is as verbose as XAML, and whenever you need something extended (like wsdl generation, like dig yourself out of a complex object graph mess, like custom hosting) you better be prepared to do DCOM all over again, but in CLR and XML land. It is easier and appears more easy, but it is a typical bloat of over-engineering. Objects which is your CLR idea and distributed programming do not mix well in any, absolutely any app that requires decent perfromance, ask Google and compare Hotmail vs GMail as an example (no need to go further).. And imagine how slow it would be if they didn't have the native transports backing all over the place (like http.sys, like msmq etc help). Worse than J2-e-messaging-to-phone.. and then people wonder why MS can't catch up.
User of Users Group wrote:
You can control both the 'error handling' and 'link time-out', you just need to dig in deeper.
If you're saying that about DCOM, we couldn't find it 5 years ago when we were fooling with it. The closest we came was the the possibility of writing our own remoting layer, but that was just too awful to consider. My view is, if something that simple is that hard to find, then it's probably not worth finding.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
JimmyRopes wrote:
Reusability is the third biggest lie. It is up there with: 1. I love you 2. I ... err, maybe we should skip number two.
2. I'll call you Or are you thinking of something not-kid-sister-safe? :-D
T-Mac-Oz "When I'm ruler of the universe ... I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm just as frustrated as you are. It turns out to be a non-trivial problem." - Linus Torvalds
Not kid sister safe. :-O
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
When you make multiple derived classes, you're reusing the code of the base class. In MFC if you use a CWnd-derived class, you're reusing thousands of lines of code. Many design patterns (such as Visitor) use OO structures to reuse code. In the pre-OO days, this degree of reuse was rare except if you were using a library. OO technology has made reuse so common we sometimes forget we're doing it.
Back in the days when we were writing firmware code for eproms, when we ran out of space, we were not allowed to use a larger eprom. So, we had to "crunch" the code. Get as much multiple use out of it as possible. These days, we call it refactoring. This usually meant writing small generic functions. When we got to that point, the projects would usually run late and was at the mercy of the programmer. Even though marketing wanted to add more features, they would always convince management that the wait was worth it. Of course, over time, new features required more time to complete since we were always refactoring and our estimates would get longer. Compared to the hardware re-engineering and assembly line retooling required to add a larger eprom, the software hit wasn't so bad.