"Skyway Builder is a great development tool that can increase your productivity by 10x or more.”
Tell us a little bit about yourself, the projects you are working on and how long you’ve been using Skyway Builder.
I’m an independent consultant with experience in both JEE and web development, and I’m currently working on a government-related project in the D.C. area. Our project team is developing a new Spring/Java application that integrates with an existing legacy application. We have been using Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE) since the end of May.
Why did you choose to use Skyway Builder and why would you recommend it to other developers?
On my current project, we have limited budget and resources, and we needed a tool that would increase our productivity. We were spending 80% of our time on infrastructure-related development, and the bottom-line is that we were tired of doing the repetitive, mundane tasks that come with application development.
Using code generation technology like Skyway Builder allows my team to focus on the high-value, business logic development, and it improved our development time by 10x. I mean, why would anyone ever choose to custom code their entire Java/Spring application? Hopefully, more and more developers and enterprises will begin to move past any negative perceptions they have around code generation because it’s a natural choice when you have tools like Skyway Builder available to you.
What Skyway Builder features do you like the most and why?
When creating a new application from scratch, the Spring MVC CRUD scaffolding feature is killer. You can literally create a full-blown, working Spring MVC application – presentation, business and data tiers – from a domain model within a matter of minutes. I have been looking for something similar to the Ruby on Rails scaffolding, but for Java/Spring, for a long time, and I found what I was looking for in Skyway Builder. The new 6.3 support for relationships between domain objects (one-to-one and one-to-many associations) makes this feature even more powerful.
When working with legacy applications, the Import Data Types feature is also key. It allows you to reverse engineer an existing database schema into Skyway. When you combine this feature with the Spring MVC scaffolding feature, you can scaffold a new Spring MVC application from a pre-existing domain model defined in a database. This has saved me a countless number of hours in my development effort.
Any tips for other developers out there using Skyway Builder?
If you are planning to do any corporate development using Skyway, I recommend purchasing one of the Forums Plus packages. Getting timely responses to my forums questions from Skyway support personnel has really made a difference on my current project. And if you have the budget, the QuickStart Training can definitely help reduce your ramp-up time.
And as a technical tip, doing a Clean build usually gets me back on track if my project doesn’t deploy or run properly the first time.
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