Feature Story
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Project Ace.Sun Labs takes software development one step further.
25.Jun.02--Project Ace is a high-level programming tool that uses concise specifications to design business objects and business processes for enterprise applications. Using Project Ace, a big application can be created with a very small amount of Java code, thus using much less effort and specialized training than developing the application straight from the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE platform). As an e-commerce test case, the Project Ace team created a Java software version of "Pet Store." "Pet Store" originally took six man-months to build. Using Project Ace, the team developed the application in six man-days. The impact on programming and development productivity is two-fold. One, fewer people are needed to create applications. Two, because development with Project Ace is so fast, it makes application enhancement possible and affordable. Suppose you're developing an application and have an idea for a new feature or capability that adds functionality and can save money. Great. But the reality is that investments usually need to pay off in the same quarter in which they are made; so if it will take six months to build this money-saving solution, most IT departments will wind up just not doing it. With Project Ace, you can do things you never could before. In a volatile world, it lets you use your IT assets with immediate deployments. The financial market is a particularly good example. New financial instruments come out all the time. And whenever a new instrument is introduced, the faster a financial house can implement and generate trade based on the feature, the more they'll be able to "skim." That means they'll be able to use that new instrument as a competitive advantage only until the rest of the industry gets savvy to it. So they have a limited window of time where a new instrument will separate them from the competition. Finally, Project Ace is designed to be architecture-independent. That means developers can use Project Ace to regenerate the application's code for new architecture and technology choices, just like a conventional compiler can generate code for different processors. For example, a developer could create an application initially for use in a two-tier architecture and, as the volume of usage increases, simply regenerate it later for use in the more powerful three-tier architecture. This architectural agility gives businesses the ability to "Write Once, Deploy Anywhere." | |||||||||
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