EnterpriseTenFold: Too good to be true?

TalkBack 14 of 65:: Next »; « Previous

Thread View
Flat View

There is truth behind the claims.: I'm fairly new to Enterprise TenFold, having first learned about the product in Feb 05. Since that time, I have evaluated TenFold for use in my company, which builds enterprise commercial software applications for the transportation industry. Both my hands-on experience to date and first-person testimonials from users who have succeeded with large-scale Tenfold deployments have confirmed the company?s claims regarding speed, quality, and power. I am convinced that TenFold is both different and better than other tools currently available for building a wide range of data-intensive business applications, and we are taking on projects that utilize it.

TenFold renders a complete application from its definition, for both Windows & Web clients. If you change the definition, TenFold (successfully) re-renders the application. TenFold makes iterative, code-free development a reality, and eliminates entire categories of bugs that typically plague business applications. TenFold enables business users and developers to collaborate directly, producing software that realizes business requirements more rapidly and more thoroughly than with other technologies.

Because TenFold elevates the role of business users in the process, much of their literature is targeted to a business rather than technical audience. It is a mistake to assume on that basis that the product is fluff ? it is not. There are truly powerful capabilities behind their claims. The skeptics should dig deeper.

One of TenFold?s driving principles is that if you can provide developers with a facility to logically describe, in sufficient detail, what they want an application to do, the code for the application to carry out that design can be generated, error-free. TenFold executes on this principle better than any other technology I am aware of.

A case in point: During a week-long introductory training class in Salt Lake City, Tenfold placed several of their own telemarketing trainees side-by-side with experienced, professional developers. All students from both groups were able to independently produce a feature-rich business application, enabled for both Windows & Web clients, in a matter of hours. This application would have taken days if not weeks for experienced, high-caliber developers to build in other technologies, plus additional time to test and troubleshoot. Even the most inexperienced students were able to build the application rapidly and error-free using TenFold, simply because they understood what they wanted the application to do, and could translate that using TenFold?s intuitve application definition facilities. And both groups were able to make numerous iterative enhancements ? the kind that would have required expert handling and lots of testing and fixes in other technologies ? quickly and error-free.

Despite the productivity gains for non-development experts, TenFold is not a cute tool for building toy applications. It is a robust, scalable technology. It addresses a tremendous breadth and depth of issues, the ones that all data-intensive business applications must face. It empowers developers to focus their time & creative energy on building the functionality unique to their application, rather than on the plumbing common to all applications. For an enterprise-caliber project, it does not marginalize the role of experienced, talented developers, but rather magnifies it, because it frees them to work on the value-add dimensions of the software rather than on plumbing which should ? and now can ? be generated for them.

Do not write TenFold off because it sounds too good to be true. The ideas it embodies were too good NOT to be true ? eventually. Fortunately for us, TenFold has made them a reality ? today.; Posted by: bkwidell Posted on: 05/03/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use