Why do you need Visible Developer?

• Faster business application development

• Scalable, 3-tier architecture

• Reduce maintenance costs

• Add business value

The pressures of tight schedules and small budgets often turn rapid application development into reckless software development. When this happens the prototype becomes the production system and temporary shortcuts (no error handling, minimal documentation, untested techniques) become part of the legacy.

Visible Developer's business objects provide a rapid and well constructed start to a business application. A large amount of time and effort were spent 'building in' good programming practices, sound designs, documentation, and many other time-consuming but equally important tasks that make the difference between a 'prototype' and a 'professional' application.

Visible Developer's code patterns generate robust, modular, well documented business objects containing all of the code your team would write - if they had the time and were experienced in 3-tier development.

One size seldom fits everyone and the same is true when it comes to business applications. And, to continue the analogy, even if it does fit today there is no guarantee it will in the future. Building a business application once is an expensive proposition, so designs that require us to rewrite even a small portion of an application each time it needs to scale upwards are not acceptable.

Visible Developer generates components that can be packaged to create a single, 2-tier, or even a 3-tier architecture without changing a single line of code. The building blocks are created for you; you decide how to assemble them. Grow your business application over time without rewriting a single line of code.

When programmers are "artists", software maintenance consumes large amounts of resources for "restoration and preservation" of their masterpieces.

Business objects generated by Visible Developer are closer to mass produced manufactured goods rather than individual artistic creations. But they are still beautiful to behold if you are responsible for software maintenance.

Consistent, structured, modular, and well documented code are the hallmarks of low maintenance business applications. Visible Developer's business objects share the same naming conventions, architectural design, functions, variables, and so on. They all look and feel similar. A maintenance programmer finds it easier to understand a complex application because the constituent business objects are very similar. Bugs are easier to find and fix. Enhancements are quicker and safer to make. Programming standards are built in at the start.

How much time does your programming staff spend solving technical versus business issues? How much of the code in the final application is actual business logic as opposed to code required to move data between application layers? Precise figures aren't available, but intuition and experience suggests that we spend far too much time sweating the technical details to the detriment of the business solution we are striving to develop.

And the bad news is distributed architectures have many more details. But let Visible Developer sweat those details for you. The code generated by Visible Developer is the predictable, but absolutely necessary, code required to implement distributed business objects. It is code you would normally have to write but now you don't. Your starting point is an application with forms, standard modules, and classes that combine to create a 3-tier business object. You are free to concentrate on adding business value, which is what software development is really about in the first place.