What makes applications future-proof?
What do the words “future-proof application” really mean?
It means different things to different people. Some say “my employees somehow rewrote another application in modern language, they port over the data and now we are running the new system; I suppose our systems are future-proof.”
Some say “I count on my SaaS vendor. They must have a way to keep their applications modern so they must be future-proof.”
In my opinion, future-proof means we should not have to spend a lot of time to modernize an existing system so rewriting a new system is definitely not future-proof.
I also think humans are less reliable than machine; that’s why we automate manual processes.
Given the above, I’d say we should rely more on an automated application development platform, which is just another piece of software, to build systems for us. This platform should build applications based on metadata and ideally the platform itself should also be built on metadata.
CRITERIA
How do we know if a platform can truly produce future-proof applications? How about the following:
1. Check that it has a history of modernizing the applications it built in the past without much human intervention;
2. Check that it performs the modernization or rejuvenation within a short period of time, ideally in seconds;
3. Check that it also modernizes itself. Why is this important? Well, what good is it if the platform itself is obsolete?
CONCLUSION
Build software by software is the most effective mean to future-proof an application. Just make sure the platform can also future-proof itself!
Originally published on November 21, 2016 on blog.rintagi.com
