April 10, 2009, 5:16 PM — This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.
Company:
White Box, Inc. specializes in the design, development, and distribution of vertical application solutions built using Iron Speed Designer.
The problem:
In today’s economy, web developers everywhere are looking for a competitive edge. They need a way to produce high quality, customizable, .NET web applications fast. Iron Speed, Inc., has created a solution to this problem, the first comprehensive code generator for .NET called Iron Speed Designer.
The solution:
Iron Speed Designer generates standard .NET code in C# and Visual Basic .NET. You enjoy unrestricted access to 100% of the code. In addition, there are no run-time license fees or special server software requirements for applications built with Iron Speed Designer. The tool supports four databases: Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft Access.
Point Iron Speed Designer at an existing database and it generates a full-featured database-driven web application. This application is easy to customize, so you can quickly incorporate your own business logic. The tool generates a highly professional-looking user interface, too. Although I have no graphic design experience myself, I no longer need to hire a designer for this task, which saves me weeks of time and a significant amount of money.
Who provided this information:
Les Cardwell, President of White Box, Inc.
How it worked:
Iron Speed Designer is easy to use and saves hours of time by generating high quality, customizable, .NET web applications without hand-coding. When faced with the decision to build your next application by hand or generate it with this tool, you may seriously consider the latter. The result is a well-organized n-tier application generated in a fraction of the time.
Rules for success:
- You can customize the generated application code with very little effort. Select what you want to customize in the Quick Layout editor. Right-click on the individual cell or control you want to modify and pick the code method you want to customize. You can visit the Docs menu to access support information on code customization.
Best practice checklist:
Before using Iron Speed Designer we recommend that you prepare your database. Once your database is set-up properly, Iron Speed Designer will handle everything for you.
Here's what we recommend:
- Create child tables for 1-to-many relationships (normalize your database)
- Create separate lookup tables for fields with a discrete set of possible values
- Create database views to express any multi-table joins and complex queries
- Declare a primary key field for each table in your database
- Declare foreign keys for each foreign key field in your database
- Create database indexes for each primary and foreign key field
Three must-ask questions:
Q: What’s the learning curve like?
A: Most of our customers experience no difficulty learning Iron Speed Designer. In fact, many report application maintenance is easier because generated applications have the same structure — anyone on your team can maintain an application created by anyone else. Learning Iron Speed Designer takes far less time than hand-coding the portion generated by Iron Speed Designer.
Q: How difficult is it to test applications generated by Iron Speed Designer?
A: Code generated by Iron Speed Designer is extremely well tested because it benefits from both Iron Speed’s QA process and thousands of other developers who use and test code generated by Iron Speed Designer. Using well-tested generated code reduces your overall testing load, so you can focus on testing your application's custom business logic.
Q: What if my database schema is evolving? How will Iron Speed Designer work with my development style?
A: Iron Speed Designer is ideal for environments where end-user requirements shift frequently. Quickly modify and regenerate your application when end-user requirements change. Iron Speed Designer includes built-in tools for synchronizing your application with an updated database schema.
This Best Practice was provided by Iron Speed.
The ideas expressed in this article are solely those of the vendor and its client, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ITworld.
