Rapid Application Development (RAD) Languages

The advent of GUIs (one reason why Windows is such a hit) changed programming down to it’s core. After all, using a command line to access files isn’t appealing to casual users. To be able to cope with the trends, programmers Rapid Application Development (RAD) languages were created.

RAD languages enable programmers to design the way that they want their program to look using a WYSIWYG editor and then write source code the UI (user interface) do something useful. Development time can either increase or decrease depending on the complexity of the underlying code you’ll be putting but in terms of designing the UI, it’s as easy as Drag and Drop.

The Visual Basic Suite and Java (using Eclipse, Netbeans or Jbuilder) are prime examples of RAD.
Note: Some people do stress that Java is a High Level language but then again, Java has evolved to encompass so many aspects of technology that a single category doesn’t apply to it anymore. I put it on RAD to to relate it to VB.

RAD languages offer the following benefits:

• Faster development especially on the frontend (the GUI)
• Simplifies creation user interfaces allowing you to focus on the rest of your program to work.
• Less learning curve especially if you know low to high level languages.

Drawbacks for RAD aren’t as obvious but they’re there.

• RAD programs are rarely portable meaning you can’t run them on any other OS. Java is an exception since you only need JRE installed.
• RAD programs are ultimately slow.

Integration is also something that only RAD Languages offers. If you were programming with two languages, it’s quite hard to make them work and communicate with one another due to a lot of issues. RADs come in packages called Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) which are actually a suite of programming languages that are configured to be able to communicate with each other. In example, if you created something in Visual C#, you can easily integrate in on an ASP.NET page or a Visual Basic.NET application.

If IDEs and RADs are too large for you, you can always use scripts.

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