Rapid Application Development involves iterative development, the construction of prototypes, and the use of Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools. By tradition the rapid application development approach involves compromises in usability, features, and/or execution speed, but with the development of computer aided software engineering tools sacrifices in overall quality are being reduced.
Rapid Application Development History
Application development refers to the developing of programming applications and differs from programming itself in that it has a higher level of responsibility, including for requirement capturing and testing. Rapid Application Development was a response to non-agile processes developed in the 1970s, such as the Waterfall model. The problem with previous methodologies was that applications took so long to build that requirements had changed before the system was complete, often resulting in unusable systems. Starting with the ideas of Barry Boehm and Scott Shultz, James Martin developed the Rapid Application Development approach during the 1980s at IBM and finally formalized it by publishing a book in 1991. Note: the history here comes from Wikipedia.
Rapid Application Development Software
There are several rapid application development tools, but the most powerful and popular ones are eDeveloper, Lazerus, Netbeans, and Omnis. I have reviewed two of these platforms. I chose NetBeans because of its practicality to the web and eDeveloper - Discovery version because it is in this author's opinion the most powerful rapid application development tool.
eDeveloper by Magic Software Enterprises (Nasdaq:MGIC), is a composite application development environment that allows the rapid creation and customization of large-scale and complex distributed applications. In eDeveloper, complete application functionality - including data structures, business rules, program logic and presentation - is developed entirely in a table-driven, point-and-click programming environment. There is never any need for coding or proprietary script. Magic Software product managers recently announced to an online user group that eDeveloper will be available in three varieties: eDeveloper Discovery, eDeveloper Xpress, and eDeveloper Enterprise.
NetBeans refers to both a platform for the development of Java desktop applications, and an integrated development environment (IDE) developed using the NetBeans Platform. Because Netbeans is Java based it is mostly used for web applications
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