Oracle Corp got very excited about the new release of its Designer/2000 modeling tool yesterday, claiming it had finally cracked the problem of generating complete applications from the model itself. Styling the announcement as its single most important technology development breakthrough since the Oracle database, the firm even wheeled out chief executive Larry Ellison to help emphasize the point. Designer/2000 Release 2.1 and Developer/2000 Release 2.1 will now enable developers to model and automatically generate 100% of their applications, according to the company. The result, it says, is five times greater productivity and virtually error free application development, with the added bonus that there is a better chance of matching the eventual application up to the original business requirements. Existing Oracle Forms, Visual Basic and HTML applications can also be reverse engineered using the tool, by converting them back into models for further development. According to Oracle, the key to the breakthrough is its Information Engineering or UML-compliant repository, which will now be common across all of its tools, and which has been extended to include full application details, including database and application design, business rules and user interface details. Oracle says it will use the tools itself in the development of its front office, financials, manufacturing and human resources applications, leaving in the modeling tools so that end users can customize the applications to fit their own business processes. Oracle’s longer term plan is to move all of its procedural language developers over to model-based development, but it will keep a separate line of procedural Developer/2000 release going for at least another few versions. Neither is it anywhere near getting rid of the need for coding altogether yet. You’re still better off doing database procedures using Forms, Ellison admitted late on in the press briefing. That code will then need to be debugged, but can then be written back into the model, something that hasn’t been possible before, Ellison said. The company’s J Developer Suite will also get a model-based front-end in the future, he said. The move from procedural to modeling is a huge paradigm shift, Ellison said. People have been trying to do this for ten years. Competitors remained skeptical, awaiting further details. Select Software Tools Inc chief executive officer Stuart Frost said there is a fundamental limitation with this kind of approach. None of the current notations, including (especially?) UML, are capable of expressing enough detail to enable complete generation of anything but the most simplistic applications. To go any further, you need either a formal definition language or you end up writing pseudo code. I find it very hard to believe that Oracle has found a magical way of getting round this fundamental issue.
