TOWARD CODE FREE BUSINESS APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Conventional wisdom holds that building high-end business applications is unavoidably difficult because applications and the technology for implementing them are complex. Empirical evidence from real projects a mply reinforces this conclusion. Building business applications requir es technical knowledge about database design, entity relationship or o bject modeling, GUI design, middleware technology, programming languag es, operating systems, prototyping tools, and so on. Pulling together a development environment and a knowledgeable team capable of tackling a large application can be a major hurdle in starting a new project. It can be argued that spiraling technical complexity makes it difficul t to focus on the application's core business problem. Complicated pro totyping tools may help with early rapid iteration, but they result in throwaway mock-ups that quickly lose sync with the application as it evolves. To reach a new level of productivity and quality in applicati on building, we need something better. This article begins with a simp le business application and attempts to sketch out what an ''ideal'' a pproach to specifying it might be. From this basic example, design and process patterns emerge that allow for the specification of a compreh ensive environment that meets these criteria.