What if Developing a Simple Data Management Application Just Took 1-2 Days?

What if developing an application just took 1-2 days?
What if I can create it myself with only 10 clicks?
What if I don’t need you developers anymore?

Said every manager since the beginning of history. This is what all managers dream of. Click click click, next next next, and you’re done! Easy, right? Time-to-market: Zero.

Of course, we engineers tend to sincerely doubt that this is possible

Data transformation and navigation

Let’s have a look at some tech stuff.

As a personal passion, I have always loved the idea of non-procedural approaches to manipulating data (e.g. SQL or XSLT). One of the best pieces of software I’ve ever seen to manipulate data was used by Ergon, a previous employer of mine and a customer of Data Geekery who has created a tool called JTT – Java Table Tool, a dinosaur written around 15 years ago. It was essentially a live RDBMS schema and data navigation tool written as a Swing desktop application. With only little metadata, this application was then capable of providing overviews of:

• All the tables that you as a user had access to
• When clicking on a table, you got an editable list of all the records in that table with standard filtering and grouping options
• When double-clicking on a record, you got an editable popup with details
• When clicking on a record, you got a “children” view with tabs for all foreign keys that link to this table. Obviuosly, the tabs were again filled with records, which could be navigated through the same way as the “parent” records
• Foreign key values were not displayed using technical IDs, but using relevant data from the linked record

… and much much more. All business logic and complex update rules were implemented using triggers and grants and just a little meta data to decide what information is primary and what information is secondary (or hidden). Most of the views obviously also were exportable to CSV, XLS, or PDF.

Ergon used this wonderful JTT for internal purposes only, e.g. for accounting, invoice management, as a CRM, as an HR tool. It pretty much ran the company and it did its job very very well. It was one of the technically most awesome products that I’ve ever seen. So lean, so simple, and so powerful (albeit, the UI… Oh well, Swing).

I pressed the product manager and the sales managers to consider revitalising this gem and to make a webapp from it that can be sold to other software companies as a product. At the time, something like Eclipse RAP might have been a good choice to allow for a hybrid desktop and web UI.

Unfortunately, they never wanted to make a proper product from this tool. So, I have always thought that at some point, I’ll create my own JTT, I’ll sell it and I’ll get rich. A browser-based database schema and data navigation tool that allows you to set up a basic data management software product in virtually 2-3 days, even when running on large schemas.

Too late, it already exists!

So these were our plans. And then I read this InfoQ article (and later on, also this DZone article by Val Huber, the same author).

“Unfortunately,” for me and for Data Geekery, I have come to discover Espresso Logic’s Live Browser, which does exactly that. Ironically, I have already blogged about an Espresso Logic product before, when I had spotted their pretty cool reactive REST API (where here, reactive means that with a simple rule engine, you could model all sorts of Excel-spreadsheet-like data updates).

But this Live Browser indeed tops what I had in mind from my JTT experience. It is actually built on top of the aforementioned reactive REST API, so it inherits all the nice features, such as the “role-based, row/column level read and update permissions”, the reactive programming features, etc. Here’s an example view from their product announcement website:

Another example from the InfoQ article:

As you can see, pretty much all of the JTT features that I’ve mentioned before are available out of the box:

• Table selection
• Filtering
• Detail views
• Foreign key navigation
• Child navigation
• Data manipulation

(Ergon, if you’re reading this: You see? I told you :-) )

Consider having this as a general-purpose database inspection tool in your company. As a developer, you can quickly navigate the schema (and the data!) in a way that you will never find in Toad or SQL Developer. Obviuosly, the tools don’t compete, as SQL Developer is a database development tool, whereas Live Browser is more of an actual… well, a live data browser.

This browser could also be used as a prototyping engine to assess whether your database schema really models the business case of your customer – a quick display to verify the requirements. Well, as I said, it is a general purpose data browser, that can be used for virtually any simple use-case.

Now, I have again signed up for a free trial at Espresso Logic, to try Live Browser myself. I could log into Logic Designer immediately (as described in my previous article). Do note that there is no single-sign-on in place between the Logic Designer and the Live Browser, so I needed to reuse my credentials to log in also to the browser.

Once I’ve logged in, I could really play around with the data in an easy and straightforward way. All the server-side rules that calculate totals are working as well. E.g. I tried changing the price for a product inside a PurchaseOrder (i.e. inside a LineItem), and it updated the PurchaseOrder’s “Amount Total” value automatically.

I wish I had created this product three years ago when SaaS started getting big. Now, I guess, it’s too late… Congrats, Espresso Logic!

More information

For more info, read Val’s article on DZone