NeuVis promises pain-free coding
- Article 18 of 77
- Information Age, September 2001
NeuVis claims to offer considerable improvements in development time for EAI applications.
Rapid application development (RAD) is a goal that many programmers aspire to, but one that few actually achieve. Moreover, when it comes to developing web applications, 'rapid' takes on a new meaning, where project times are measured in weeks, rather than months or years.
In order to help developers meet the exacting time constraints imposed by the Internet, Arun Gupta's company NeuVis has taken on board just about every RAD concept – from reusable objects and automatic code generation, through to the use of Universal Modelling Language (UML) techniques and XML (extensible mark-up language) – and ploughed them into NeuArchitect, a modelling and construction system for ebusiness application development.
Developers use NeuArchitect to “engineer” – rather than code – an application. With the NeuVis Modelling System, they create a model of the business processes involved; the NeuVis Construction System then converts the business model into a program and the NeuVis RunTime System allows the business to deploy the application. There are components and interfaces for virtually every enterprise application, client and server platform, and messaging protocol, claims Gupta.
NeuVis had previously focused on applications and architectures for ten vertical industries, including banking, healthcare, recruitment and insurance. “Everything is optimised for a given industry, and companies can quickly establish e-business using our visual tools, which are combined with the specific components of a given industry,” says Gupta. But this year, the company opened up its approach so as not to focus on particular industries, although the templates still exist within the product.
A typical development cycle using traditional tools and methodologies can last anywhere from six to 18 months, but Gupta claims that, NeuVis's tools cut that down to between 12 and 15 weeks.
NeuVis must now convince prospective customers that simplicity does not equate to a lack of flexibility, and that the code produced by NeuArchitect is not so generic that it offers no advantages in terms of performance and competitive differentiation.