Gartner pushes code reuse
At Gartner’s Application Development Summit, Gartner analysts Dale Veccio and Matt Hoyle opined on the present and future of enterprise application development, as reported by DevSource. Their keynote focused on four themes: the new application development lifecycle (with an emphasis on delivering applications better and faster - imagine that!), project and portfolio management, “frontier” application development, and project management and governance.
Related to that last them, I found this particular commentary revealing:
“The future of application development is not about programmer productivity,” said Hoyle during the keynote presentation, “but in assembling functionality from components.” While programming will not go away, he stressed, programming has decreasing importance in delivering excellence. “Assembling, buying, and extracting is an increasing part of what you need to do,” he said. To be more agile and responsive, application development managers have to manipulate, orchestrate, and compose new business processes, using resources available from outside partners, third-party applications, Web services, and existing code components. Veccio asked, “Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?”
Reading between the lines, or reading into his comments my own bias, this sounds like a clarion call to use more open source software. Yes, application developers can build from scratch as they’ve often done in the past. But why? If you need a best-in-class content repository, why wouldn’t you use Alfresco’s? Need to embed a database that looks/smells/acts like Oracle, but isn’t? Use EnterpriseDB’s version of PostgreSQL. Want web conferencing functionality but don’t want the headache (product-based, license-based, and cost-based) of WebEx? Use DimDim. And so on.
There’s so much exceptional open source software out there, available at a fraction of the cost of self-development or proprietary software…why would you ever want to do it yourself again?