Even the software development community is moving into the hosted
application market, writes Danny Bradbury
At the Application Development 2000 show in London, last month,
development tools companies Aonix and Rational Software unveiled
plans to produce online services for software developers.
In its Software Through Pictures range, Aonix produces software
modelling tools which allow companies to graphically design their
applications, and then generates some parts of the program code
from that design.
Aonix has now rolled out the Architecture Component Development
(ACD) technology, which enables developers to generate software by
entering information about the application into pre-designed
templates.
Paul Harris, technical manager for Aonix, believes that software
developers can generate up to 70% of an application's code by using
the ACD model. He says the company is hoping to launch a hosted
service offering online code generation.
"We think that if we can integrate the mechanisms into a portal
concept and people send their models in, we could send them some
code back," Harris says. "And we will send them back a list of the
flaws in their model."
This would also enable Aonix to offer hosted ACD services for
users of Object Management Group's Unified Modelling Language
(UML)-based products from Rational Software and Select (now part of
Princeton Softech). There are already versions of the ACD
technology available for installation on client machines running
these rival products.
Rational Software's online service has come under the guise of a
separate business called Catapulse.com. The company was founded in
October 1999 by Rational founders Paul Levy and Mike Devlin,
although they, along with the 23 staff at Catapulse's California
offices, have been very cagey to date about strategic
directions.
Iain Gavin, UK marketing manager at Rational, revealed at the
show that the service will provide companies with the ability to
manage and store all aspects of their application development
projects online, making use of Rational's tool on a hosted basis.
He says the service will be particularly useful for large
teams.
Catapulse will use Rational's development tools and network
management services and a server farm from Loudcloud, the company
started by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.
Outlining the reasons for creating a separate company to
Rational, Gavin says, "We have a lot of cash. If we said to Wall
Street analysts that we will invest $50m in, say, Rational
Developer.com, they would have slated it. This way it firewalls
us."
Rational invested $50m in the company in February, while venture
capital company Benchmark put in $25m.
Catapulse will also include a software development portal,
including a chatroom and software development links. The service
will probably use the Rational Clearcase version control
technology, with an extension called Multibase, that will cater for
software development by large, distributed teams.
Expect to hear more about this project from the Rational User
Conference in Philadelphia in August.