Template-like software said to cut coding tasks

by Jack Vaughan

February 13, 2001 —

Longtime IT education house DevelopMentor Inc. has taken a plunge into the packaged software market with the Gen<X> code creation tool. This software assistant is intended to provide a ready means for developers to create reusable templates that reduce the need to perform some repetitive programming tasks.

Established in 1993, DevelopMentor has specialized in training, with a heavy emphasis on Microsoft programmer technologies. Company founder, president, and CEO Mike Abercrombie said that DevelopMentor has been looking for an effective way to help students spread newly gained knowledge throughout an organization, after taking courses. He sees this software package meeting those needs.

Gen<X> acts as generalization software to spread the best of developers' templates. DevelopMentor senior technical staff member Chris Sells began to create Gen<X> as he became aware that DevelopMentor teachers, many of whom are consultants, had no ready means of sharing their expertise.

"Consultants are asked to solve the same problem over and over again, " said Abercrombie, adding that what is increasingly needed is a focused way of capturing the expertise that master developers have gained. Gen<X> allows such programmers to share their know-how by creating sets of code templates and enabling tools that can be utilized by other developers.

The DevelopMentor software, the first edition of which is aimed primarily at COM and ASP implementations, uses Visual C++, with VS.Net, Visual Basic, and Java-savvy versions said to be in the works.

"The most predominant form of reuse is 'cut and paste,'" said Abercromie. In integrating a database with a Web server, he noted by way of example, a developer may create numerous table-building scripts, and employ cut-and-paste methods that are time-consuming and error-prone. With Gen<X> acting as a template manager, developers can use their known-good code as templates for creating reusable scripts, he said.

In some ways the approach is similar to using code wizards, but, said Abercromie, DevelopMentor has fashioned Gen<X> to be more flexible. Important too, the tool lets people build software in familiar ways -- it does not require adherence to a set methodology.

Reusable software strategies have usually revolved around object-oriented software. But Lauren Lilly, product manager for Gen<X>, plays down the influence of object-oriented technology here.

"Object-oriented technology is all well and good. But it tends to be difficult to build the ultimate component," said Lilly.

In Lilly's estimation, components are usually viable only in certain well-understood problem domains.

"At heart it's a code problem rather than an object problem," he said.

Lilly claims moderate initial savings -- by one estimate, 39 percent -- in project time when using Gen<X> instead of manual cut-and-paste methods. The amount of time saved increases on subsequent projects, he said. Gen<X> is now in beta with general availability scheduled for the first quarter of this year. An authoring edition and four runtimes will be priced at $995.

ITworld.com