Rapid Application Development – Then and Now
I was exposed to the Singularity Process Platform for the first time back in 2004, while working on a project for one of the world’s largest banks. As with most BPM projects, we were implementing a solution that coordinated both system-to-system processes, system-to-human processes and human-to-human processes. For any of the processes that required human interaction, you obviously had to provide some way for humans to interface – generally through web-based screens.
In 2004 Singularity hadn’t yet included the automated forms and user interface generation component in the product. Back then we had to separately design and code the user interface screens after we had developed the graphical process models in the platform. I noticed that a lot of the interface design had a similar pattern – some screens were needed by users to initiate a process, some were used to display a list of pending activities for a user, and then you had task-specific screens for the completion of a piece of work, such as reviewing compliance documentation or approving an expense.
At the time it occurred to me that, if the interfaces were generally of the same type, we should have a tool that could automate the repeated coding to save development time and reduce overall costs. This system should be smart enough to figure out which activities in a process map were manual and then provide screens for those steps.
And in 2005 Singularity introduced the integrated Forms Builder as part of the modeling environment to do just that (in version 3.0). Now when you’ve developed your process model with it’s list of automated and human activities, you press a button and the product auto-generates the user interface screens for all of the manual activities that require human interaction. You press the ‘deploy’ button and the combined set of executable process models and associated user interface screens are deployed to a runtime server. Users interact with the new solution by clicking on a URL which leads them to a process portal page displaying their upcoming tasks, performance charts and so on.
I’ve mentioned all this because it just occurred to me that a project I’m working on today, similar to the one I was working on in 2005, which took 6 months (for the complete life cycle) will now be completed in 45 days. That’s progress.
About the author: Kameswara (Kamesh) Uppuluri is a member of the Singularity Professional Services Team based in Hyderabad, India. Kamesh is a Senior Software Engineer on .NET Platform and is currently part of our Live Project Support Team. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and is responsible for training Singularity employees on the Singularity Process Platform (SPP) and on .NET Technologies.
