People buying the software...
The Managers and Directors and Vice Presidents want some things.
They want to ignore that fact that computer programmers are professionals.
Commercial software developers tell the buyers that their software will "revolutionize" the industry. I've heard it for almost two decades now. They promise that companies won't need programmers anymore. Business analysts will be able to "do most of the work", and you'll only need programmers for the last little bit.
And funny, they appear to almost accomplish it, when new technologies come along and make everyone start over again.
Back in the MS DOS days, Clipper was a pretty good non-programmer environment. Paradox was too. But, people would always stretch the tools to the limit, and then drop into programming to accomplish the last part.
If you're doing something significant, you need a large database and a server system. You can't do it on Clipper or VB or Delphi or even JBuilder. Even though people are telling you, I'm not even sure you can really do it in EJB's. But maybe you can if you decide to purchase a lot of hardware.
A GUI development tool will allow a non-programmer to get so far. IDEs facilitate that. But you need a programmer to give you the last 30-40%. The back-end server stuff.
BEA/IBM and other middleware vendors are now trying to "GUI-ize" the back end, the server part, which is usually written in a high performance language with a high performance database. EJB's are a start. And I think Web Services are another attempt. Will they succeed? I don't know. Back in my Tuxedo days, we were trying to do the same thing with InConcert, a workflow tool BEA bought from Xerox. Make a GUI that builds and exports "services", that seems to be the mantra right now.
My thoughts are you don't need BEA or IBM's GUI tools. You need some good developers. And a good Code Editor or IDE tool (but don't promise pointy clicky with it).
Glen Austin
