Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of the golden era of 4GLs. These simple, but at the time revolutionary, tools enabled business-aware programmers (usually termed analyst-programmers) to quickly build & deploy line-of-business apps. They (both tools and devs) were primarily data-driven, data begat screens, screens begat more data and so on. The resulting apps where server delivered, using either green-screen terminals or client-side delivery apps (a bit like current-day client-side RIAs). The resulting UIs could best be described as “plain but functional”.
These halcyon days were replaced by a combination of 2-tier Windows apps and by the 3-tier enterprise platforms. The increasing sophistication & complexity of the new platforms forced programmers to become highly specialised, often losing their once close links with the business, and even losing sight of the value of business data as a resource in itself (still amazes me when I come across business application programmers with poor or non-existent SQL/RDBMS skills). The analyst-programmer (AP) was no more.
Many of those APs, like myself, managed to stay close to the business by either becoming business/data analysts or datawarehousing/BI specialists. ERP platforms such as SAP, with their complex configuration requirements, also created a welcoming home for business-focused IT refugees.
The need for quick’n'dirty line-of-business apps has not disappeared, but this service is now often being provided by tools such as MS Access and above all, by Excel. This is both good and bad; the good is the expansion of development skills outside of IT; the bad is the effective dis-arming of a large proportion of professional IT folks. To paraphrase, Marvin the Paranoid Android: “Brain the size of a planet, and all they give me is Excel!”
Most of us managed to make the best of the situation, learning to respect, if not love, Excel; becoming SQL wizards; MDX magicians and dimensional modellers par excellence. But the call of the 4GLs remained and we veterans continue to keep a watchful eye for something that will match and hopefully surpass them.
Oracle’s Application Express (aka HTML DB) offered those with Oracle skills hope (very similar in concept to SQL*Forms V3) and the open source tool WaveMaker is also excellent, styling itself, with good reason, the Powerbuilder for Web Enterprise.
In the last month I’ve come across two modern-day descendants of these 4GL data-driven tools. Hobo and LightSwitch.
Hobo, is an open source extension to the Ruby on Rails platform. It uses the same MVC architecture but takes the concept further in not just allowing you to build a relationship model for your data, but also enabling the easy specification of a lifecycle model and, here’s the biggy, automatically building (and re-building on change) a very respectable UI to present to the outside world. It also offers a starter authentication framework and lots of other useful helpers. All without writing a line of Ruby code, or having any idea of how RoR works! The end result is a tool that can not only quickly, and iteratively, build CRUD type applications, but can also handle simple workflow apps out of the box.
LightSwitch, is similar but yet very different. The same, in that it follows the traditional 4GL data to screen approach; presenting the user with a graphical tool to build data tables, to link to existing data sources and to create relationships between entities. Screens can then be generated that, like Hobo, are professional looking and easy to use. Again like Hobo, new ‘skins’ can be applied to change the look and feel.
If a more sophisticated solution is required, code can be added (VB.NET or C#) at predefined events and indeed the resulting project, being fully VS 2010 compliant, can be opened in VS Professional and built out from there. (A similar ability to get under the bonnet exists for Hobo as it is essentially Rails).
Where LightSwitch differs is the deployment methods used. The end result is a Sliverlight app which can either run client-side (with full access to the client’s environment e.g. interact with Office etc.) or as a sandboxed IIS browser app or via the Azure cloud. Same code, same project can easily migrate back & forth between all three options. (Hobo, being a Rails app could also be sort-of-localised using RubyScript2Exe, but it could very easily be cloud deployed using the EC2-based, dead-simple to use, http://heroku.com/)
The LightSwitch data modeller also allows for relationships between local databases, network databases, SQL Azure cloud databases and web service datasets to be built and maintained within the application. The need for mashups between local & central/remote data is a constant requirement for LOB developers and LightSwitch appears to made it very easy to implement.
This data mash-up ability and the option to interact with the client will be a major attraction, at least for corporate devs working largely with MS tools. I say will, as alas the current beta is “molasses-in-January” slow. I thought initially it was just my 5yr laptop hitting the wall, but others with more modern & powerful hardware also found it so.
So do tools like Hobo and LightSwitch herald the return of the IT analyst/programmer? Probably not, different times; outsourcing, SaaS and packaged software have and will continue to reduce the number of business-facing IT staff. But their places are been taken by IT-aware business folks, citizen programmers, creators of time-assets and it is they that will likely be the beneficiaries of such tools.
