More Exec Design tools

I'm a fan of even partial solutions to the executable design problem. Here is are a couple I find particularly interesting.

DataXtend

http://www.progress.com/dataxtend/index.ssp

I had the opportunity to run a 1-week in-house live test of DataXtend. We took a bit of design from a set of web services we had delivered using Apache Axis and a lot of back-end Java code, and gave a design spec and the original interface specs to the DataXtend team. They showed up in our office on Monday and we did a little work on reviewing their capabilities. On Tuesday, we started working on the project, which had taken our offshore development team 6 weeks to develop (admittedly, that's way longer than it should have taken, partly due to continuous changes in the requirements, and partly due to just poor development management). By late Tuesday afternoon, we had a working web service. I load tested it; I threw bad input data at it, and I deployed it in several different environments, and it just worked.

We ended the 1-week demo in 3 days.

This tool is a slick as it gets. You import your interface design, expressed in XMI or as a schema or whatever (there are lots of options), you map it to your data sources, again specified as XMI or schema or whatever, and push the button. You get a working web service in a nicely packaged deployable file, with very little, if any, coding.

This isn't executable design--but it leverages the design very directly and very easily. You simply import the interface, and import the source services and/or data, and map one to the other. It's state-based implementation at its slickest. It's expensive, but it's a whole lot less expensive than a fleet of Java coders. We figured we could replace 6 developers and 2 leads with 1 lead and this tool. Nice.

MQArchitect

http://www.mqsystems.com/MQS-Solutions.html#mqarchitect

I haven't actually had a chance to use this tool, because I no longer have access to a large MQ installation. I have, however, been tasked with architecture in a large, fast MQ environment, and boy, oh boy, do I wish I'd had a chance to play with it. I did download the demo and tried it, and as far as I can tell without actually pushing 100k transactions/hour through it, it really works.

The basic idea is that you design your queue environment using some templates in Visio, and then you generate your whole system from that drawing. MQ is a pretty simple tool at the core, but there is a lot of connection and configuration data, and you have to get it right, or your nice fault-tolerant system fails badly, and worse, quietly. Fortunately for me, I had a couple of MQ wizards configuring my back end for me, but if you don't (and most of us don't), this may well be the right tool for a designer trying to keep track of a complex MQ system. Check it out.

If you have a tool I should look at, please drop me a line. I'm jdandrews on Twitter, and you can email me at jerry.andrews at gorillalogic dot com.