Friday, May 4, 2007

Web Service Software Factory v2 evaluation

After some tests of the Web Service Software Factory v2 it's time for my thoughts some kind of evaluation.

The whole Software Factory idea is great. You got a built in framework and built in code generation in the development environment. Your development time could decrease and the quality could increase. I say could because it doesn't matter what tool, framework or technique you use you could abuse it and get the opposite result.

I think that this version of Service Factory isn't ready to use in real life projects. There are some critical issues that must be solved first.
  • The framework doesn’t quite feel like a whole. There are different wizards you must use and then there still are source code you must write manually. This work flow must be clearer and more natural.
  • The code-generation is just for the first time, and then you must code changes yourself. There must be a way to do the generation many times.
  • The code-generation is made from the existing database. The work flow should start with the creation of the business entity. The database should be a place for storing data and the focus should be the business entity model. If we use model-first we have a model to use for repeatedly code-generation when needed.

My main concern is that this version of Service Factory isn’t using a model-first perspective. By model-first I mean that the development is starting with the creation of a business entity model and a model for the service contracts. The models will be the glow that holds the whole application together, all code-generation will use the model as the truth.

Today I found and downloaded the v3 of Service Factory. It is really great. The major difference to v2 is that now we use model-first and the models are the foundation of the application. If you do any changes in the model just re-generate the source code.

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