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Adalon 2.1
Instant productivity
by Paul Bonner

June 2002 Issue

Coding is the easy part of being a developer. The hard part is getting to the point where you can start. Far too many development projects fail long before a single line of code gets written because their designers do a bad job at one or both of two critical precoding stages: the transformation of business requirements into processes, and the evolution of those processes into architecture.

Adalon 2.1, an innovative new tool from Synthis Corporation, significantly reduces the risk of failure at both those stages by providing a framework or structure for managing every precoding stage of a Web development project, from identifying business requirements to producing code skeletons in the architecture of your choice. Adalon, a 100% Pure Java-based desktop application, combines forms, diagrams, and a tree-structured project outline to provide the tools and generate the documentation necessary to take you from project inception to a point where you can start coding the fine points of your business logic and UI interactions (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Application Design in Adalon

To start a project in Adalon, you need to know what you're starting with (your business requirements) and where you want to go (your destination architecture). Adalon 2.1 can generate code skeletons for the Struts framework, JSP Fusebox, and Cold Fusion Fusebox methodologies, and version 2.5, due this summer, will add support for generation of the J2EE Pet Store framework. Moreover, it's possible to create custom generators to output Java code conforming to any standard or framework by customizing the XSLT style sheets Synthis uses to transform its internal adXML (ApplicationDesignXML) meta-model of your application.