RDF are pleased to announce the first of our Model Driven Development (MDD) events in the City of London on March 24th. RDF’s partnership with the innovative Dutch group Mendix has put RDF firmly in the driving seat as a pioneering company in the use of MDD. RDF’s Model-Driven approach using the Mendix platform allows rapid development of applications and launch of products without the need for traditional hand coding techniques. MDD using the Mendix platform has been proven extensively in the Netherlands and US and is now making waves in the UK.
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Are you under pressure to deliver more from less?
Today’s business organisations operate in an increasingly tough environment, from a competitive, financial and regulatory framework perspective. Whichever direction pressure comes from, one thing is certain: organisations cannot keep still if they want to survive, so IT applications and systems need to change and adapt to new business landscapes. The need for this constant renewal demands agility and flexibility, to reduce cost and time-to-market and to ensure that solutions are aligned with business strategy and continue being so when strategy changes.
Agility and Model Driven Solution Delivery
Agile software development has recently been embraced by a large number of organisations. One of the key tenets of the agile approach is that code is master, and models and documentation are secondary artifacts. However, producing and maintaining code continues to be a time consuming and error-prone task.The reasons are not hard to imagine: there is a long distance to bridge between business requirements and code expressed in languages like Java and C#, with all the errors and distortions that can be produced on the way, and associated validation and testing costs. In addition, the people who best understand the requirements, i.e. business people and business analysts, are not directly involved in the development of the solution, opening the way to misinterpretation and miscommunication errors. Model Driven Delivery (MDD) brings the business analyst into a central development role. Code is no longer master, in fact it becomes almost irrelevant. MDD empowers the business analyst to create solutions to business problems using visual models that are much closer to the business requirements than low-level artifacts such as program code. Not only are the resulting solutions of higher quality as a result of the level at which they are stated, but the time and cost of developing them are dramatically shortened. MDD has been around for some years, however most existing platforms adopt the code-generation approach, in which the solution is always made up of program code, and models have to be translated into code before they can be executed. So code ends up being, if not the master, the key executable artifact, which has to be tested for correctness if not maintained independently from the models.
Why Choose RDF and Model Driven Delivery?
RDF have partnered with a leading MDD vendor, Mendix, whose product is arguably the most advanced MDD platform on the market. With Mendix, models produced by the business analyst are directly executable by a run-time engine, with no need to generate executable code. So where has the complexity gone? The answer is that business logic complexity has not gone away, and is tackled by the analyst at the modelling level. What has gone away is the technical complexity of designing and writing program code.
This new approach therefore demands a high degree of precision and detail by the business analyst, as all data definitions, flow rules, business rules, screens etc, need to be defined completely and precisely in order to be executable. Unfortunately a large number of business analysts are good at understanding business but not so good at documenting their thinking precisely, having always postponed detailed specifications to the coding stage. At RDF, we have used for many years a modelling approach that demands precise and complete models, to avoid having to make business decisions at the coding stage. Hence our analysts are ideally placed to work with the Mendix MDD platform. Our developers are also well placed to become modellers, as they also have been exposed to modelling languages in their design work. In addition, the Mendix platform allows actions to be defined within the model, and implemented in Java if necessary, leveraging the Java skills which are in abundance at RDF.
Benefits
- Reduced time to market: Models are the only artifact to be produced, so the development cycle is reduced by a factor that can range from 50% to 80%, according to the nature of the requirements.
- Reduced development effort: This is a consequence of the reduced timescales, and also of the reduction in team size and number of development and validation activities in the life cycle.
- Increased flexibility: Adapting a solution to a new set of requirements is more direct, hence faster and less expensive, with the same savings cited above for development of new solutions.
- Business alignment: Models are much closer to business requirements than code. MDD facilitates fast iterations with frequent feedback from business people, ensuring that solutions stay in line with business expectations.
- Easy Integration: The Mendix framework adopts open standards for easy integration with existing platforms and components, whether within the organisation or across the value chain.
- Rich and dynamic user interface: The Mendix framework uses a personalised web client, based on Ajax technology. You can also run Mendix solutions in your portal environment.
- Performant and scaleable solutions: The Mendix run-time engine is optimised for high performance and runs under any J2EE Application Server, so it can work in a clustered, scaleable environment.
Conclusion
True business agility and flexibility comes when business is freed from the tyranny of code. Try the MDD approach from RDF and you’ll never look back.
Contact RDF now to reserve your place or click here to receive an invitation to find out more about the benefits of MDD.
