Business Component Prototyper for SanFrancisco: An experiment in architecture for application development tools

The technology behind distributed processing, frameworks, and the Java language environment is relatively new and changing fast. This requires that current application development tools adapt more quickly to requirements of their users. This paper describes how these tools can be made more flexible and customizable. As an example, the architecture of Business Component Prototyper for IBM SanFrancisco™ is presented. In its current form, Business Component Prototyper is a tool to develop prototype applications provided with IBM SanFrancisco v 1.4. Its objective is to help new SanFrancisco developers create small prototypes using the SanFrancisco foundation layer programming model, without requiring the heavy tool set used for production application development. IBM SanFrancisco is a Java™-based set of components that allows developers to assemble server-side business applications from existing parts, rather than build “from scratch.”