Rapid Applicati on Prototyping and Development (RAPAD)

The Rapid Application Prototyping and Development (RAPAD) environment applies an innovative model-based architecture-directed approach to support rapid prototyping, the transition of prototypes into full-scale applications, and the efficient maintenance and evolution of fielded systems. Our approach is an open solution that is user extensible to new application architectures. The generated code can be user tailored and optimized to meet specific application performance requirements and the large number of variations that exist in large scale application architectures. A RAPAD developer models the application by simultaneously defining the application data model, the user interface model, and the application semantic models. This application model is executable providing a powerful rapid prototyping capability. An innovative aspect of our proposed approach, which significantly extends our current work, is the concept of architecture directed generation of application code. The application architecture serves as an integration framework for integrating generated and existing reusable application components. This approach also facilitates the development of application architecture specific optimizations that are necessary to meet the system performance requirements. In addition, models can be analyzed to assess different performance issues by exporting the models into different COTS analysis tools.