Introduction

My name is Paul Marrington, software developer.  Well, just Paul Marrington, actually.  The software development part, as you might have imagined, is what I do.  Before you join the other 99% of visitors to any given web-page, why not take a moment to hear a story that has a good chance of hitting close to home.

I joined the software industry in its infancy, and by the early 80's I was spending my time exclusively developing software for myself and my customers.  I was among those who saw the merits of micro-computers before they became mainstream, and so the PC was my bread and butter for many years.  Shareware was the word of the decade, and each person owned themselves.

But - and this is the part that might sound familiar - a family and the necessities of life forced me to realise that the only customers who could afford to consistently support developers in their trade were the corporations, and so I joined the queue and was contracted out.  For the last six or seven years my primary source of income has been working as an architect and development manager for corporate client/server systems - the mainframe'd masses - and it scares me how easily I joined their ranks, and how quickly my skillset began to be molded exclusively fit the Information Systems model.

However, working as a corporate development manager I came in contact with many developers who were highly interested in application development, and I came to see that a great deal of client/server architects would be developing shareware and freeware for themselves, if they could use the same techniques and tools that they were used to.

I've also watched designers develop HTML pages for the business to sign off and give to developers to be converted into xSP (JSP, ASP, PHP, etc) for implementation. Not only does that mean developers are wasting time in the conversion but more importantly, the designer cannot easily change the interface as the customer's needs change. I like the idea of the web page signed off by the client going into production with little or no change. That way the GUI designer can make visual changes without interference from development.

So, wanting to try my hand at application development again, and hoping to eventually provide the same opportunity to my colleagues, I decided to create a system for enterprise developers to be able to create shrink-wrap systems. Adept (Application Development - Enterprise to Personal Transformation) was born. I have divided my development efforts into two source trees. There is a support library in com.marringtons.library, while the Adept specific code is in com.marringtons.adept.

As yet only the Adept library has been released to open source on Source Forge under the name adze-db. Why the seemingly unrelated title? Because I'd originally decided on naming the system as Adze for Application Development with ZEn. I enjoyed the acronym, and liked the image of the carpenters tool relating to application development.  Unfortunately, my son pointed out that the name Adze could easily be misinterpreted as one of the many spam-related publicity/advertising tools available, and I didn't want to place that stigma onto the project.  So I changed the name to Adept, but the adze-db project had already been opened on Source Forge, so I decided to keep the old name for the library.

So, why adze-db? The world does not need a new generic library, but a simple effective shrink-wrap database was not available when I started this project. I decided on creating an object database. Like all my development efforts it is based in the KISS principle - so it is not nor will it ever be DAO complient. I think there should be 3 S's in 'simple' - one for simple to use, one for simple to maintain and one for simple to develop. The database ended up good for the first, OK for the second, but the third did not get a look-in. At best I built it up from well separated classes, most of which are coded for simplicity, but I was optimistic to believe that a database could ever be simple.

Lastly, why this blog? I have a separate blog for software development issues at http://marringtons .com/Adept/blog/Software.Development/. It's primarily there to discuss technical industry issues. This blog, however, is specific to the Adept open-source library. I will discuss various aspects of the system and how they will help you solve your problems, why I have developed them and the decision I made that may be of interest.