Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Benefits of Metadata Driven Development


Eyal Pfeifel, Magic Software’s Chief Technology Officer, recently sat down to discuss metadata driven development. In the video, he provides a useful definition of metadata driven development: “Metadata driven development means developers build business applications using metadata and not using code. Metadata is a high level definition of business objects like forms, dialogs, validations and other things that are part of a business process that build a business application.”

Eyal Pfeifel contrasts metadata driven development with traditional coding or manual programming. “Unlike code which is tied to a specific platform or operating system, metadata is a high level definition and theoretically can run on any platform or operating system. Given that you have the appropriate runtime engine, you can build an application built using metadata on any kind of a device, server or client,” says Pfeifel.  
As Chief Technology Officer for Magic Software, Pfeifel certainly knows what he is talking about when it comes to traditional programming languages. Magic Software uses these more difficult third-generation languages (3GL’s) to create the metadata driven platform that is integral to Magic Software’s higher level and more intuitive application platforms. For this reason, he is keen to recognize the benefits of the metadata paradigm over traditional programming. “One of the main benefits of working with a metadata driven development paradigm is that since metadata objects are high level business objects it is possible to build a complete business application in a much shorter time than it would take when using code.  And the same business logic that you can construct one time very easily is relevant for multiple platform and operating systems like desktops, servers and even mobile devices.”
As Magic Software introduces its impressively expanding capabilities as a mobile enterprise application platform provider, Pfeifel has found himself commenting a lot recently on one of his favorite subjects: mobile application development.  “Using a metadata driven platform it is very easy to extend an enterprise application that originally started on a desktop or on a server into mobile devices because once you have the runtime engine running on a mobile device, it can theoretically run any type of application that you built on a desktop,” Says Pfeifel.  “And you can extend your business processes into a mobile device without needing to rewrite the application from scratch and with minimal adjustments just to cater for the smaller screen size or different form factor of the mobile device.”
Magic Software has a strong reputation for providing expertise that can future-proof your application development investments. As one can see by sitting down with Eyal Pfeifel, Magic Software's future-proof expertise is based on extensive customer feedback, strong R&D investment and the mindset to continually think ahead. To learn more about the Magic application platform, visit magicsoftware.com.


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