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Industry Watch: They call it Dev 2.0


By David Rubinstein
May 15, 2009 — 
From a far corner of the development world comes another voice proclaiming that the days of large, heavyweight builds are behind us—unless you’re an ISV creating a completely new product, that is.

Many development shops today find themselves building small, satellite applications around some larger ERP or CRM system, or adding some other extension onto an existing deployment. And as such, they are looking to find ways to do this in a way that reduces development and maintenance time and cost. One way is to empower the business user to modify existing applications without coding.

This is the philosophy behind “Dev 2.0,” as defined by Dr. Gautam Shroff, vice president of technology programs at Tata Consultancy Services and head of TCS’ Innovation Labs in Delhi, India. “The question really is, ‘How much can you make configurable?’ Just as Web 2.0 is the idea of everyone being a publisher, we follow that do-it-yourself philosophy with Dev 2.0. There are a lot of things that don’t require being tossed back to IT,” he said. “You want to make IT act as an internal software service provider.”

Of course, when you talk about letting business users touch applications, developers feel the hairs on the back of their necks start to stand up. But Shroff was quick to point out that none of this is designed to replace developers. He believes developers should be working on the big things that differentiate the business, not the small things that take time away from the projects that can help grow a business.

“I’m not sure business people can do things that easily," said Shroff. "If someone needs to write back-end logic, for instance, business users can’t do that. But if it's already created, business users should be able to add a check box with another form, to do the same thing ‘here’ that’s already done ‘there,’ like adding a field to capture more information.”

Shroff held up Salesforce.com as a company that’s leading the way into Dev 2.0, and said TCS has built its own “hosted-development-as-a-platform” offering called InstantApps. For years, he said, TCS built application models that generated code, but under the concept of hosted development, the TCS team realized that people should be able to create applications that do what a model says, without generating code. InstantApps, he explained, “is essentially a hosted platform that allows users to make some customizations.” The goal, he said, is to “let enterprises become their own Salesforce.”

The promise of cloud computing is that a user can provision a server with the click of a button, start the configuration workflow and logic, and get an application up and running quickly. A big problem for some companies, though, is that they can lose access to the database.

“With [an offering like] Salesforce.com, there are two decisions: You must decide to do this kind of development, and to host your applications on Salesforce. The whole world isn’t ready to host everything on a platform they don’t understand.”

In its hosted format, TCS uses a visual designer to create a model that is deployed with an interpreter to the customer’s data center as a virtual machine. The model also could run on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud server as well. Shroff said some ability to configure the model might be released as part of the application functionality, but TCS does not release the platform for end users to develop applications as of today. Shroff would only say plans to deliver development capabilities through Amazon are in the works, bundled into an Amazon Machine Image.

Business users, though, can modify these applications, such as adding a field, with a few mouse clicks in the application interface, Shroff said. Information corresponding to the new field is added into the metamodel and an additional column in the database is created. The interpreter simply behaves accordingly when the application is invoked, and the new field appears wherever it needs to, capturing and displaying data, he explained. “It’s great for small apps under 5,000 function points and 500 concurrent users,” he said.

The beauty of this is that the InstantApps platform can be deployed behind an enterprise’s firewall, while TCS provides services in the background. So the issues of trusting the host, or accessing data, no longer enter into the decision-making process.

In the current economy, anything that provides faster, cheaper alternatives that can free up developers to work on projects that advance an organization’s goals is worth looking at.

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

 


Related Search Term(s): Industry Watch


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