Ran across a reference to James Gosling and what he’s up to on Craig Larman’s site. . . (I have this habit of seeking out famous software folks’ websites – typically they’ve got lots of interesting articles and resources on ’em, and sometimes sneak peeks at their books). Turns out Mr. Java is building a new development system. From Sun’s site,
“Ace technology enables developers to simplify and automate the development of enterprise Java applications, create applications that are easy to migrate from one architecture to another, and optimize performance and scalability”. The site claims to have replicated a system (the Java Pet Store) that originally required ~14000 lines of code and six months development time, in 224 lines of hand-written code and one week.

I’m interested, but not biting yet. Memories of bad experiences with another code-generation tool called Versata come to mind. I’ve never yet found any sort of tool that’s as inventive in its ability to both create business problems and solve them than the human mind. Code-generators have to play by rules; humans don’t. But if I can convince our CIO to give someone (me, maybe?) some free time to build a real app with it, maybe I could be pleasantly surprised.