Run Then Specify: An Intelligent Framework For Building E-Business Applications

In this article, we present our approach for rapid, easy and safe web-based applications development. We implemented a new 2 Steps “Run then Specify” Model Driven framework, in which the development phase is postponed to be after (not before) the deployment phase.In this approach, the application development is based on a “descriptive and human readable” language. The language is composed of a set of predefined formal and readable business-components, which allows to manage the 3 tiers (client, business logic and storage) in one human readable and short sentence. The framework engine directly runs these business components; with no need for any further compilation or deployment. Moreover, this readable language enables the reconstruction of the business model when the analysis documents are lost or becme obsolete. This approach was implemented and tested within our framework built using J2EE, Jboss and several databases including MySql database, Oracle, Postgres and Sql server. To evaluate this approach, we compared its performance to Spring Framework. The average Time-to-Learn of our Framework was 20% of that of Spring, the average Time-to-Program of our framework was 25% of that of Spring and the average Number-of Code Lines that the developers wrote using our framework was about 11% of that they wrote using Spring Framework.