– Brendon Ritz and Lauren Barraco, marketing and public relations for Iron Speed (http://www.ironspeed.com/), say:
Similar to most applications, database applications are typically used for:
- Reporting and tracking – reporting, summarizing and visualizing data.
- Data entry and management – collecting and editing data from users.
- Business process automation – orchestrating data flow between multiple systems.
- Workflow and scheduling – automating step-wise business processes.
Iron Speed Designer and other application development tools are productivity enhancers; they’re a way to build enterprise-level applications quickly and easily- without hand-coding. Because most business applications are built atop an underlying database, they lend themselves to automated and semi-automated solutions for creating custom Web pages and data access code. Data elements, and even entire panels and charts, can be dropped from the Iron Speed Designer toolbox onto the layout spreadsheet without any programming.
The tool also includes a wide variety of professionally-designed page styles that create visually-appealing Web applications without a graphic designer. You can customize these styles, or create your own to maintain your corporate look and feel. Many of the options available in Iron Speed and similar Web application builders would take weeks or even months to build by hand. Additionally, features such as reporting, data import and export and application security are not commonly included in most custom applications.
While traditional software developers may disregard application generators in preference to their own hand-written code, the time and costs savings of these tools are too significant to ignore. Even non-developers can build applications in just a few hours or days, rather than weeks and months- all without programming. Some of the key benefits of application generation include:
- Reduced software development costs. Applications can be developed and deployed faster and more efficiently with less cost in human resources. Proof-of-concept systems can be rapidly built, feedback gathered, and quickly modified.
- Consistent look and feel. Generated applications have highly consistent and professionally designed user interfaces, giving applications a finished look and feel, even at the prototype stage. A consistent look and feel across applications reduces end-user learning curves when assimilating new applications.
- Simplified application maintenance. Generated applications follow a highly consistent architecture, allowing any developer to maintain any application. There is little or no ‘ramp up’ time necessary for one developer to maintain another developer’s application because the architectural knowledge transfers from one application to another.
In saying that, application generators including Iron Speed Designer, can be difficult for the uninitiated. Our extensive help pages and multi-level training courses are designed to provide assistance for any degree of experience. Most other solutions have “a la carte” pricing, which in most cases, force the purchaser to pay for unneeded features. Before you jump knee-deep into your application solution, try out the Iron Speed Designer trial edition which includes all the features of the tool with a test database.
If you would like information on one of the most current application generation tools, you may want to visit http://www.ironspeed.com/, or other similar Web sites, that can further explain how these tools can help you increase your credibility and performance as a professional application developer.
