"We work with pure knowledge, and if that true knowledge
is true today, it will be true tomorrow regardless of what technology gets to
prevail", pointed Eng. Breogan Gonda, President of ARTech during the conference
given at the closing of the 15th GeneXus International Meeting.
Mr. Gonda stated that the present times in IT are
turbulent. The reasons for this turbulence are many and they lead to the
breakpoint of the paradigm of programming-based development.
Among these causes, Gonda highlighted the increasing
complexity in systems which have to behave more simply at the same time. Client
needs themselves make for more complex system development while millions of
users of IT systems on Internet require simplicity of use in applications. But
while the complexity of the problems increases exponentially, the productivity
of programming languages is reaching a ceiling.
"The productivity increase curve offered by programming
languages has a horizontal asymptote and we are reaching it", stated the
President of ARTech. That means "we are getting to the end of the paradigm of
manual programming based development." The breakpoint of this paradigm will come
to be in five years at the most and we have to be ready, he added.
To overcome the decrease in productivity of programming
languages, the software industry has transferred development to countries where
labor is cheaper. "However, that is not a solution but a way to stretch the
problem", said Gonda. The solution proposed by ARTech is different: it is
describing instead of programming.
ARTech's solution is based on its own technology which, as
ARTech's President highlights, "could be developed because we have been able to
detect an invariant framework of reference on which we can make our
descriptions, thus increasing productivity and thus maintaining data basis
automatically.
With this technology ARTech has achieved "a very good
automatic administration of the business systems knowledge" which is exclusive
to it, and in particular, it created GeneXus.
"What we want to do with GeneXus is solving all the system
development and maintenance problems of our clients", explained Gonda. And this
solution has four dimensions to it: completeness (automatically maintaining
everything that is generated), productivity (of GeneXus over manual system
development), universality (generating for any platform) and usability of the
development tool (for GeneXus to be user friendly).
The President of ARTech reviewed the history of GeneXus
and recalled that 15 years ago GeneXus entered the market by generating 70% of
the programs for a single platform (IBM AS/400) with an important increase in
productivity, greater usability and automatic maintenance of all the programs
generated.
In 1992, ARTech could generate with GeneXus 100% of the
application, all the programs and maintain them for good. And the increase in
productivity then was potentially 5 to 1, pointed the President of ARTech, who
explained that productivity is always a potential, because it is a tool that can
be used well, poorly or badly. Usability also improved back then, but we still
only generated for AS/400.
It was in 1996 that ARTech started to make Client/Server
generators for the main data base servers and it was with the appearance and
later enhancement of Internet -with Java and .NET- that ARTech could give the
GeneXus tool 100% of universality. "We could finally generate for any living
platform, any platform for which new systems were being made", stated
Gonda.
Then, in 2004, instead of offering a 500% increase in
productivity versus manual development with GeneXus, ARTech set itself a much
more ambitious goal: achieving a 2,000% increase in productivity. And they
decided to offer their clients this increase of productivity in two stages:
GeneXus 9.0 the new GeneXus version that implies a 100% potential increase in
productivity from the previous GeneXus version (2 to 1) and the next GeneXus
version -Rocha code name- which will double productivity again.
The pending issue is usability, pointed Gonda and he
warned that although it will take a long time, the path to achieving it is
clear.
Today, ARTech has 5,000 clients in 31 countries, who have
bought over 30,000 licenses. This is ARTech's strength, as emphasized by its
President: "The synergy of the community of over 50 thousand people that make a
living from GeneXus around the world. Those nearly 50 thousand people, from five
thousand companies, generate automatically with GeneXus several thousand million
lines of code a year which means several thousand million dollars a year for
these companies. This is our strength."
Besides, he pointed that there is an enormous opportunity
for the community, for each one to make their own GeneXus, customize it,
contributing what it needs because GeneXus is becoming increasingly open. "We
are also becoming more open and if anybody is having success at solving the
problem of context administration, if the community needs it, instead of doing
it ourselves, if somebody else has already done it, we will promote it. We have
the mindset to do it and the technology for it to be done", he
stated.
"Reality is just the part of the dream we have been able
to make true at a given time. Let's not abuse realities. Let's dream!" proposed
the President of ARTech when concluding his conference.
(from the conference of the President of ARTech, Breogan
Gonda, at the closing of the 15th GeneXus International Meeting.)