The term Rapid Application Development (RAD) has become more generic since its earliest use in 1991, where the use of an iterative development style and the construction of prototypes was first considered. These days, it is widely used to describe the use of various techniques to speed up application development.

Why we use Rapid Application Development

The term Rapid Application Development (RAD) has become more generic since its earliest use in 1991, where the use of an iterative development style and the construction of prototypes was first considered. These days, it is widely used to describe the use of various techniques to speed up application development.

Since our inception in 2012, we have assessed and adopted various methods, tools and techniques to improve the service we provide for our customers.

Introducing Waterloo

Waterloo refers to a number of component parts that Tappware has developed in house to speed up the development of common functionality in software systems. It consists of three main components, a project template, a scaffolding engine and a set of common libraries.

Project Template

The project template provides a well structured starting point for a new application, providing a well separated back end, consisting of front end WebAPI controllers, a domain layer where business logic resides and an infrastructure tier to deal with data persistence and versioning. It also provides a front end framework starter kit and a number of common aspects of any application such as user management, login, logout and session management etc.

Scaffolding Engine

The scaffolding engine provides developers with a powerful GUI based interface to quickly generate common screens and the related back end functionality for common functionality such as listing entities, sorting, filtering, adding, editing and related validation. In other words it automates the production of common/repetitive CRUD code allowing developers to spend more time developing the specific functionality of an application. The code generated by the scaffolder is high quality and not bespoke, meaning that any developer can pick it up and work with it without requiring the scaffolding engine or any bespoke components that require licensing.

Common Libraries

The set of common libraries provide common functionality such as messaging, validation, logging, file management and search.

Easily adaptable tool for the developers

All developers at Tappware receive full training in how to best make use of Waterloo, and the standards we follow to write consistent and robust software. This is followed up with regular meetings to refresh knowledge and introduce new concepts/features. This approach to continued professional development, a shared wiki documenting best practice and all-important reusable code repositories enable us to build applications in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Rapid Application Development Benefits

Quicker development times

We automate the coding of standard application functions like adding and viewing records, viewing lists of records, searching, and filtering and all general database interaction. This drastically reduces the time needed to build the application, resulting in earlier delivery.

Uncompromised planning

Just because we’re developing at speed, doesn’t mean we take short-cuts. We are careful to retain our personal touch and fastidious approach to planning. We combine our approach to prototyping with rapid application development tools to deliver a carefully crafted, complete blueprint for your new system or application.

Lower costs

Dispensing of the need to write basic code means you pay for less development time, therefore significantly reducing the overall cost of the project.

Standardized coding that eliminates bugs

Our automation tools use a standard process to create foundation code. This consistency eliminates bugs and makes it easier for the code to be supported long-term.