Trends in Component Development: Where Is the Industry, and Where Is It Going?

Guest Opinion

Trends in Component Development: Where Is the Industry,and Where Is It Going?

By Dean Guida

Although my background spans many years as a softwaredeveloper, I haven't coded for more than 10 years. Today the majority of mytime is spent involved with Infragistics development teams and in numerousmeetings with our customers from Fortune 10 companies, independent developers,and commercial software companies. I'd like to share with you some of thetrends I have observed regarding component development in today's marketplace.

The first trend I've noticed stems from a disconnectbetween corporations (who want thin client applications) and developers andusers (who want a rich client/server user interface and experience). Recently Ipresented before a large financial company on the topics of .NET and ourpresentation components for Visual Studio and Visual Studio.NET. There, I metthe man in charge of a group supporting the development teams for his company.He told me they had a mandate to write all future applications as thin clients.This created a lot of pushback among the development teams as they and theircustomers have come to expect the rich functionality of client/serverapplications. But after my demonstration their browser-based broadcastsoftware, viewed by hundreds of their developers around the world, they saw thelight: It is now possible to deliver the rich user interface within a thinclient or ASP.NET application. I think this speaks to the great architecture ofASP.NET component technology and the advanced levels companies such asInfragistics bring to ASP.NET user interface components. ASP.NET delivers anobject-oriented language development platform to build your server-sideapplications. This allows you to reuse functionality and makes maintainingsource code easier. You can program your browser-based screens through familiarAPI calls to methods, events, and properties. The neat thing is that the UIserver-side component, through its painting or rendering technology, streams downthe appropriate HTML or DHTML code to display the interface in the browser. Therendering is so sophisticated, you can even have hierarchical grids withOutlook grouped by functionality in your browser! Put an Outlook bar and graphwithin the page and your users will feel like they are running their favoriteclient/server application.

The second trend I have seen is the progression ormaturity of development managers' desire for developer productivity and the useof development tools. When I was building applications for Fortune 500companies, my development teams were concerned about productivity, but we weremore concerned about the art of building software and showing everyone howsmart we were. We created all the plumbing and systems software in addition tothe real deliverable, which was the business application. Of course, after wecreated these massive code bases, we would want to move on to the next newsoftware project and leave the problems of software maintenance to someoneelse.

Today, I think this way of thinking is over. Economically,it simply does not make sense. With reduced budgets, the high cost of softwaredevelopment, and the wide selection of pre-built, field-tested commercialcomponents, developers are asking: Why reinvent the wheel?

The third trend I see is the evolution of reusable code.Developers are demanding more than a single component, but frameworks ofcomponents that are built in such a way that they can learn one component andthen be able to leverage that knowledge to use another set of components in thecollection. Frameworks also lend themselves to build well thought-outcomponents that are stable, extensible, and flexible because there is a sharedcode base among the components.

In the past, developers, project managers, CIOs, and CTOswould say that UI components are an afterthought to the development process.They'd say, "If I run across a problem, I will pick up a UI component to solvethe problem." What a lot of them are starting to realize now is 35 to 40 percentof a development team's cost and effort is spent on the presentation layer. Ifyou could cut down the time on this area of development and buildcommercial-class interfaces with a consistent API, everybody wins. After all,first impressions count.

Finally, what seems to be consistent for the 20 years Ihave been in software development is that developer tools continue to get moreadvanced every year, but the job of building and integrating computer systemscontinues to get more complex. We are more in demand now then ever!

Dean Guida is CEO and president of Infragistics and was CEOand a co-founder of ProtoView Development Corp. Guida has more than 15 years'experience in the technical industry, and he oversees all aspects of hiscompany's business operations and corporate direction. Guida also isresponsible for cultivating strategic alliances and other externalrelationships, as well as managing corporate financial affairs.