Through 2002/03, J2EE-centric integrated development environment (IDE) vendors (e.g., Borland, IBM, Rational, SilverStream, Sun, TogetherSoft, WebGain) will continue to expand into developer portals and incorporate life-cycle process interfaces while simultaneously incorporating support for key Web services standards (e.g., SOAP, UDDI, WDSL). All major infrastructure vendors will improve the capabilities within their own IDEs (e.g., IBM WebSphere Studio, Sun Forte for Java, Oracle JDeveloper). By 2003, development frameworks associated with particular IDE/application server combinations will be marketed as a key differentiating factor.

A successful AD strategy requires coordination between IT management and AD groups to encourage and formalize agreement on key requirements within a development platform (in terms of code editors, IDE, build tools, version control and SCM, deployment, unit testing, etc.), and then mandate the use of this platform across different development groups or business units. We expect some technically savvy organizations (less than 20% of Global 2000 organizations) to opt for flexibility when creating this development platform via the use of best-of-breed solutions and/or open source tools (e.g., GNU Emacs, Eclipse or NetBeans IDE, Ant for build management, CVS for version control, JUnit for unit testing).

However, the majority of G2000 organizations will rely on vendor-provided platforms that limit flexibility within the AD framework in return for greater integration among core components (e.g., Borland JBuilder, Oracle JDeveloper, WebGain). Regardless of the approach chosen, ensuring consistency is critical to avoid the proliferation of non-supported development tools throughout the organization, as this will increase application support costs and decrease opportunities for collaborative development projects among business units and internal transfers of knowledge.

In addition to all vendors incorporating support for core Web services standards, key trends AD organizations need to understand when defining and sourcing an AD framework include the following:

• The expanding footprint of IDEs: In addition to providing a standard combination of editor, screen painter, compiler, and debugger, IDEs now increasingly encompass a broader set of life-cycle practices (e.g., modeling, testing [unit and stress], deployment management, workflow management, change request tracking). We expect this broadening footprint of IDEs to increasingly marginalize standalone products and drive continued consolidation (e.g., TeleLogic's acquisition of Continuus and QSS Doors, Aonix's acquisition of Select).

• Modeling and coding finally come together: Iterative development is a key to increased productivity and a far tighter fit between business requirements and delivered functionality. Past attempts at linking static process flows and/or application and component models with code via reverse engineering have met with limited success (if not outright failure). Several vendors have released solutions that better link models and code in real time (including Rational with XDE and TogetherSoft with ControlCenter).

• Open source initiatives gain momentum: While limited-scope, standalone tools will face increasing pressure from broader AD suite vendors, open source alternatives are gaining ground within organizations not willing to commit to a vendor-specific AD approach (often due to past negative experience with high-end fourth-generation language and code-generation environments). As frameworks and patterns evolve and mature, we expect to see more organizations (particularly AD groups with mature development processes and more technical development staff) choosing a third-generation language approach to development, as well as a manual code/build/deploy process that ensures transparency and simplified maintenance/modification of distributed applications.

• Agile processes take hold: Interest in agile development methodologies, such as extreme programming (XP), continues to grow as an alternative to more traditional software methodologies, such as RUP (Rational Unified Process). Where traditional approaches focus on containing software costs through structured planning processes designed to capture defects during the planning phase, XP is successfully being used to speed the development process, reduce the cost of change, and increase customer satisfaction. During the next 18 months, we expect all major development tools to incorporate support for agile approaches as core functionality.

The Bottom Line

Leading organizations are increasing developer productivity, decreasing time-to-market, and reducing application and technology sprawl by mandating wider use of development, deployment, and application frameworks. We therefore advise IT organizations to define and manage enterprise-wide application delivery processes and frameworks to increase corporate agility and lower overall application life-cycle costs.

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