These days, businesses need to adapt to changes quickly and they need their software to do the same. They need it developed and updated in less and less time. This speed and adaptability is key to what Rapid Application Development tools offer developers.
Rapid Application Development
Rapid Application Development (RAD) is not a new term, but it is gaining in favor again as people and companies strive to create the software they need. RAD is a better way to make software! With RAD, you have focused, small projects and you use more appropriate tools to help create the software. Small is beautiful!
The idea is to not spend a lot of time on up-front design requirements and specifications and instead to create something quickly and refine it over time. This iterative approach to creating software allows you to rapidly get to working software that you can show to your customers regularly to get their feedback.
This user involvement is critical. By showing customers that you can create software rapidly and ship it regularly, they become invested in its development. And they know that changes they want or bugs they need fixed have a better chance of being addressed in these frequent releases.
RAD is truly win-win for development teams and their customers.
How Can Xojo Help?
One of my favorite quotes is from Alan Kay: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”
Xojo is great at making simple things simple. It doesn’t overwhelm you with too much all at once like other development tools so often do. This approach means you can quickly start creating your app, and learn as you go.
Xojo is particularly great for creating prototypes of apps. Even if your company primarily uses other tool chains such as Java or Visual Studio, you can take advantage of RAD and Xojo to quickly create prototypes to show to management. Perhaps this prototype will help get a full project funded or perhaps you’ll end up using Xojo to create the final product.
Because Xojo can create apps for so many different targets, it is particularly well-suited for RAD development. Xojo can create apps for:
- iOS (iPhone and iPad)
- Desktop (Windows, OS X and Linux)
- Web (and Xojo Cloud adds 1-click deployment)
- Raspberry Pi and other ARMv7 single-board computers (coming soon)
So if your company has a mixture of Windows, OS X and Linux machines, Xojo can help. If you are switching to Linux to save money on OS licensing, Xojo can help.
Do your developers have OS preferences? Xojo itself also works on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Industrial-Strength
Not only is Xojo great for prototypes, but it also has industrial-strength features needed for serious software development projects:
- Works with any source control system, including Git and Subversion
- Open-source unit testing framework
- Many available open-source projects
- Many 3rd party products
- Robust database support
- Interact with web services
- Threading
- In-App Scripting
- Robust graphics
Learn More
With Xojo, you’ll be able to have faster time-to-market, reduce your complexity and improve the quality of your software development projects, all while lowering your development costs.
Want to learn more? Download Xojo today and try it for free. And watch the Rapid Application Development video to see Xojo iOS, desktop and web projects in action.
