Unified Development Environments

The unified development environment (UDE) market represents the convergence and integration of interactive development environments with visual interfaces as well as rapid application development tools and environments, higher-level languages (including 4GLs), and component-based development (CBD). It also includes the tools that help automate various aspects of developing applications from components and within component framework environments.

The unified development environment market does not include tools whose primary function is to support formalized modeling and business rules methodologies that assist in generating application requirements, data definitions, and programming specifications.

Unified development environments are those environments and/or tools that explicitly use, integrate, or combine the abstract benefits of technologies and features from 4GL, RAD, CBD, and visual interfaces as part of the development environment. This functional market includes:

• 4GL/RAD tools. 4GL/RAD tools are nonprocedural, higher-level language-based tools used by professional programmers to build applications. To be considered a 4GL, a tool must provide a higher level of abstraction than a 3GL, afford dictionary-based application development, and perform semantic consistency checking.

• Legacy 4GL tools. Legacy 4GLs are defined as early abstracted development environments that were marketed before the advent of visual programming interfaces. Despite the antiquated nature of these environments, many remain in use primarily to address mission-critical business functions.

• Component-based development tools, including component construction and assembly tools. Component-based development, construction, and assembly tools are primarily used for the construction of software components and/or the assembly of software components into larger components, services, or applications.

• Component frameworks. Some companies package components in the form of an open architecture component technology, often referred to as frameworks.

• Composite development and assembly platforms. Composite development and assembly platforms include technologies that facilitate the construction of composite services or composite applications that are highly standards compliant. These technologies are characterized by a contextual configuration-based approach to development.

The following are representative vendors and products in the unified development environment market:

• Above All Software (Studio)
• Borland (Delphi)
• Digital harbor (PiiE)
• IBM (WebSphere Studio, Workplace Designer)
• Microsoft (Visual Studio .NET)
• Sybase (PowerBuilder)