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Rapid Application Decline?


Analyst, vendors, share different views on RAD

By Jeff Feinman
October 15, 2007 — 
When the concept of rapid application development first surfaced in the 1980s, RAD was heralded as a way to meet application delivery schedules, at the risk of sacrificing usability and features.

But as new tools focusing on sheer speed have emerged since those days, does RAD remain relevant?

Analyst Rob Enderle, founder and principal analyst of The Enderle Group, argued that the concept of RAD is dead. Some tool makers say that RAD has undergone a metamorphosis and has now implies agile development, while others believe that traditional RAD is still very much alive.

Enderle claimed that RAD is quietly dropping out of software ecosystems because people feel it isn’t needed anymore. The drawbacks, such as reduced scalability, seem to exceed the benefits, he said.

When RAD was first introduced, it was positioned as an alternative to classic “waterfall” methodologies. Before RAD, noted Enderle, requirements would change faster than software could be developed. But since then, he claimed, ordinary development tools are fast enough that deadlines are met without requiring specialized RAD tool sets. Advanced languages such as C and C++ have become much more powerful and tools are now created with more focus on having a product move quickly through the life cycle.

Michael Swindell, vice president of products for CodeGear, believes that the RAD market has changed, with traditional RAD processes evolving into agile ones. Agile processes, he said, use RAD techniques that include rapid iteration and rapid prototyping, but agile is a much broader process with its focus on team interaction and time boxing.

Swindell cited differences between the traditional processes of RAD and RAD tools on the one hand, and frameworks such as CodeGear’s Delphi and RAD Studio and Microsoft’s ASP.NET that have evolved to support the need for agile development, on the other. Today’s frameworks are extensible and open, he noted, with the ability to see source code and direct access to operating systems and hardware.

Meanwhile, Sue Dunnell, product manager for Sybase’s PowerBuilder RAD software, has a very different take on RAD, that it is still very much a legitimate development method. Dunnell pointed to Eclipse and SOA as modern examples of RAD in action.

“RAD as a concept is used constantly,” she said. “It’s used in virtually every new product and utility that’s out there, and developers expect everything to be drag-and-drop, easy-to-code, and all that.”

But Enderle and Swindell seemed to agree that the concept of RAD is essentially obsolete. “The RAD concept was a point solution to a problem that existed with older tools that simply took too long to go through the full cycle, but the shortcoming doesn’t really exist anymore,” Enderle said. “Speed is now a core function of any development effort, and it appears most folks can address the timeliness of a product without dropping into a RAD tool to accelerate delivery.”

Swindell concurred: “We’ve seen the strict RAD process decline over the years to be replaced by agile development and agile processes. As companies are moving towards agile processes, the idea of rapid development hasn’t gone away; it's just that a closed-box type of RAD environment like the old PowerBuilder where they would black-box runtimes with fixed functionality built into them—that idea has gone away.”

Dunnell bristled at the notion, arguing that RAD tools were “built to evolve. With PowerBuilder, we simplify development. With AJAX, for example…[users] click a check box to use AJAX, and under the covers, we do all the hard work.”

But Enderle sees RAD-centric tools such as PowerBuilder as antiques, noting that RAD is no longer a primary way to address a fundamental development problem, and merely a point solution that can be used while developing with a mainframe or legacy platform. Yet RAD as a concept still hangs on, Enderle said, because “it takes a long while for a technique like this to purge itself.”


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