Hello,

I have worked with App generators of various capabilities since the mid 80's when Ingres' integrated office suite got lost in the Office wars that were won by MS Excel and Access.

The key factor for success in the design of an Application Generator is the granularity of the regeneration cycle: too coarse and the developer has to stop and regenerate everything to add each small modification, too fine and the developer gets lost in the complexity of the tool itself and loses track of the logic of his application. At either extreme the work flow is interrupted and the developer must give up on the tool and get back to his assigned work.

So it has been with great trepidation that I have expended the necessary time on the experiential learning curve with Sculpture. I started with the back end since that seemed normal and the video's followed that logic as well. However, after finally getting into the UI portion, I realized that the regeneration cycle needs to be managed by careful planning and careful execution of the Sculpture model diagram.

Fortunately I believe that the key differentiator with Sculpture is its dependency/implementation of an interactive UML-style Communication diagram as a logic management tool. Therefore I am not too discouraged by the need to actually plan the majority of the application logic prior to starting the code cycle. In fact, I usually will use Enterprise Architect to sketch most of my application logic while I am estimating, proposing and presenting an application to the customer.

So I would like to commend the Sculpture team again on their accomplishment. I have been able to find ways to actually build a usable application for deployment in a customer environment to fulfill actual specifications. While it has been difficult and costly in terms of sleep time and other quality of life values, at this time I believe it has improved the quality of the actual application code.

At this point, I believe the important adoption aspect is to focus on careful planning in detail about the logic and the rest of the very minor aspects of the interface and the values transferred between objects. With any app generation tool, the main bargain is the tradeoff between custom development time vs. re-generation operations. Having to regen to add a field to a value object or a view model becomes expensive and can interfere with critical business cycle milestones such as client demos!

Also I would like to mention that the style of the code produced by Sculpture is substantial and standards-based where it needs to be, such as in the data access layers, and satisfyingly interesting in the forward layers such as the controller. And I have been very pleasantly surprised that the organization of the generated unit tests is excellent. I am able to drop into a unit test immediately after generation and debug directly into precisely the area of the code that I was interested to see and implement.

So at this time I would like to report that my experience with Sculpture to date has been sufficiently rewarding to encourage me to continue with Sculpture for production-level work.

Thanks very much for your hard work,

Kimball Johnson