In the 1990's, RAD tools such as Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and Delphi radically changed how enterprises developed custom desktop applications. Today there is another revolution underway in enterprise applications. This one comes not from traditional providers of programming languages and integrated development environments, but rather from customer relationship management software vendors. This new approach to enterprise software differs from the conventional J2EE and .NET based practices in two important aspects. First, these platforms provide a higher level of abstraction, enabling business users to create much of the application. Developers are used to augment the application in specific areas. Second, these platforms enable the resulting business application to be deployed as a service running in a cloud. This is radically reducing the time to market for business applications. We will examine two examples of this disruptive technology: Force.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. In the traditional software development model, the developer needs to decide on a hardware and software platform, create the middleware infrastructure (such as databases, web frameworks, security and the like), and then only after all of that is in place can they interact with the business users to create an application. But the new services such as Force.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online change the game by providing a largely "soup-to-nuts" environment that provides all the major infrastructure already integrated and ready to deploy to the cloud. This means that the developer spends much more of their time focusing on the business use cases, and that the business users can be much more actively involved in the development process. Of course, nothing comes for free, and choosing to use one of these new platforms has significant implications in terms of applications portability, as well as the technical restrictions that are imposed by the platforms themselves.

This seminar is a joint presentation of IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org)