software development

Software Development Platform Comparisons

So many development environments to choose from, so little time to work with them!  You may see something about an environment of interest to you, but wonder just what is working with it really like?  Well, I stumbled upon a recent report of interest from Evans Data Corp. on the top software development platforms.  Their report is loaded with useful information about the products evaluated: Eclipse, Delphi, Rational Development Tool Suite, IntelliJ, Visual Studio and Tools, NetBeans, Jdeveloper and tools, and Sun Studio.

Since I work mostly using Visual Dataflex my experience with these tools is limited — yet my interest in them is high, so I found the report particularly informative.  The report ranks the tools in over 15 areas such as “Ready to Use out of box experience”, “Sample Apps”, “Database Development Tools” and “Integration with Databases”.  There are also charts and comment on overall ratings by development platform.

The report is freely available from Evans Data — I’m sure many who read this will find it an interesting read.

Legacy Application to Windows - Challenge of design

I’ve discovered the greatest challenge of my application programming and design career,  (Hopefully I haven’t met my match!).  My latest project involves a rather large legacy character-based system which has evolved over the past 20 years or so.  The source code directory lists some 800+ pieces of source code, with close to 500 being actively used, and others that were basically copies of some “active” source with minor modifications - mostly in the screen layouts for entry programs, and header footer changes on reports.  In all, a lot of code to evaluate. Continued »

Danger! Has Software Development Become Too Easy?

While reading on the web recently I actually saw a comment from a developer who expressed (rather strongly as I recall) his thoughts regarding software development ease.  His basic premise was that software development has become so easy given the tool-sets available to developers these days that there are too many developers who are developing software that shouldn’t be because while they may understand how to use a tool to get something working, they do not have the background knowledge to really “understand” what they are creating, therefore creating a “danger” - be it a security danger or data integrity danger.

WOW!  What a perspective!  I believe it was originally posted somewhere in response to the release of the SANS Top 25 Programming Errors.  (See my January blog post “Software Development, Security and Programming Errors“).  At the time I simply dismissed the comment as being way out in left field - but the comment has haunted me since reading it.

I suspect that the comment has haunted me as it has because I am keenly aware that certainly there is the potential of an element of truth to the perspective.  However, I’m not so sure that “easy” software development tools add to the problem, I would expect well designed tools (easy or otherwise) to be producing well designed and secure software.