mrc Hits the Throttle with Development Tools

January 30, 2007 Alex Woodie

In the world of application development, speed means everything. The faster you can write a program and get it live using real data, and the faster that application hits that database, the sooner you start improving and scaling your business for profit. Speed–of the development, integration, and performance kind–was the focus of a recent round of improvements unveiled by development tool maker mrc.

The folks at mrc have seen a lot since the company was founded in the early 1980s. The Chicago company–whose initials stand for Michaels, Ross, and Cole–made its name with a fourth-generation language (4GL) development tool for IBM‘s midrange business platform, the roots of which are evident today in the mrc-Productivity Series line. While the company still services the RPG-loving iSeries crowd and has thousands of iSeries customers, during the past few years its focus has shifted to the m-Power line of development tools, which was launched two and a half years ago, and which generates 100 percent Java code that executes across a variety of server platforms and databases, without any manual coding.

The mrc-Productivity Series also generates Java code, and so both product lines–mrc-Productivity Series and m-Power–can be upgraded with new capabilities simultaneously (although there are some things that m-Power can do that mrc-Productivity Series can’t, due to its iSeries legacy). This is what has happened with the new Web 2.X series of templates unveiled by mrc this month.

The performance improvements are a result of changes mrc has made to the underlying templates, as well as changes to the SQL plumbing used by m-Power and mrc-Productivity Series applications. The number of lines of code used by the templates has been slashed by 90 percent, which boosts raw throughput, response time, and scalability. The templates are also easier to modify using standard SQL techniques, says Joe Stangarone, mrc’s president.

“We’ve allowed more technical people to go modify the SQL calls that the templates do,” Stangarone says. “We had customers doing that, but they were modifying Java code. We have externalized that capability [with the Web 2.X templates]. All you need is a SQL programmer. Very, very powerful types of things are achievable because we have separated the major SQL capabilities.”

Stangarone also credits some of the new Web 2.0-type capabilities with the maturation of the Java tools ecosystem. “When we first came out with servlets, a lot of things hadn’t materialized with Java,” he says. “I don’t want to say the language has changed, but things have been done to [strengthen the structure of the language] such as Struts and Springs . . . When we first came out with servlets, we were thinking about [offering this level of automation and performance]. But it wasn’t there. What this release of Web 2.X templates is doing is really taking advantage of that.”

Developers should find it easier to incorporate outside applications or data with applications developed with m-Power or mrc-Productivity Series. “We’re still doing Java servlets, but we have made them more flexible with other things out there in the Web world,” Stangarone says. “It’s easier to transfer data with other technologies, and AJAX is more incorporated.”

mrc includes about a dozen templates with m-Power and mrc-Productivity Series. The templates take the drudgery out of coding specific processes, such as a single record or multi-record inquiry, which programmers can then use to build full applications, such as a dashboard or an executive information management (EIS) system, or a shopping cart or order entry system.

Many of the improvements unveiled this month with Web 2.X are focused on improving mrc’s business intelligence and dash boarding capabilities. Last fall, the company concentrated on improving its reporting tools. The next round of announcements will focus on the creation of “maintenance” applications, so-called because they’re designed to enable a user to keep business records up to date.

The Web 2.X templates are available as a free download to all m-Power and mrc-Productivity Series customers on maintenance. The new templates should work with all recent versions of the development tool suites. mrc no longer tracks its suites with version and release numbers, but customers shouldn’t need much more than a new Java Development Kit to make the new templates work.

m-Power and mrc-Productivity Series are sold by the number of database instances they’re connected to. Pricing for m-Power starts at $28,800 for a connection to one database. For more information visit www.mrc-productivity.com.