N-tier at your own risk - multi-level architecture for component-based development - includes table of products and related article on ActiveX and components - Technology Information

Software Magazine, Dec, 1996 by Colleen Frye

Baker has adopted this strategy at May & Speh. She purchased the Forte development environment from Forte Software Inc., Oakland, Calif., because it was object-oriented, and has been an early adopter of third-party components. Her group purchased the Fortify set of foundation class libraries, which are prepackaged components from Brahma Software Solutions Inc. that provide functionality to aid interaction with collections of objects in Forte.

The first application Baker's team developed with Forte and Fortify is a decision support system, currently in beta. According to Baker, it will be used in-house and sold to other direct marketing firms. She expects it to be in production in 1997.

Even in this early adoption stage, Baker has seen benefits from component-based development. "From a developer's perspective, you go in and do maintenance in one place. And purchasing components enables us to leverage third-party tools. You get higher quality engineering than if we had to spend time on engineering it ourselves. It makes development faster." Reuse was high on the requirements list for Kronos when the company chose VisualSmalltalk Enterprise from ParcPlace-Digitalk Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., to replace a legacy product. In addition to being a good environment for building graphical interfaces, Smalltalk was also appealing because it is purely object-oriented, with a rich class library, says Mark Mojkowski, a developer on the project.

"Componentry and object orientation and reuse were high factors in the decision," adds McKenna.

In July, Kronos released TimeKeeper C/S, its first application. One component they built with VisualSmalltalk Enterprise was a schedule, which they were able to reuse throughout the application says Mojkowski. "It's a rich object; it expresses when employees should be where, and it has repeatability." Several benefits, such as time savings, have already surfaced from this development effort, says Mojkowski. "You don't have to redesign a large piece of behavior in an application. It also minimizes the amount of testing, and decreases the size of the application," he says.

Will this type of development also decrease and stifle the developer's creativity? According to Wisconsin Electric's Bustle, who uses the Forte development environment and has also purchased the Fortify component, it will depend on what type of precanned classes developers use. "If they're more line-of-business objects, [developers] might object a bit, but even most of that gets to be rote and boring. I think they will see [component-based development] more as a blessing than a problem."

The software assembly line remains just a vision at this stage, however, even for early adopters like Fima Katz, acting CTO at Concorde Solutions, Concord, Calif., a subsidiary of Bank of America. Concorde Solutions is using the Paradigm Plus object-oriented analysis and design tool from Platinum Technology Inc., Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., to build banking objects for Bank of America. "We're desperately looking for something we can buy, but what is available today is GUI-type components," laments Katz. "We're looking for business components." Though software component malls for enthusiastic consumers like Katz are just ramping up, Andersen Consulting's Moldauer says the shift to component-based development will usher in the millennium. "I'm convinced it will happen well before 2000," he says. "The momentum is really shifting. Will there be a lot of components to get [at malls]? That will be interesting to watch. Will more people use a component approach? Yes, and that will happen fast."