Re: best prototyping tool

You know, the Serena product isn't even in the same class as NetBeans or
Flex Builder. NetBeans and Flex Builder produce code on some level. Serena
produces a collection of documents... unless I completely missed a step in
their demo where they said "compile" or something.

This is a class of product called a Software Requirements Management or
Software Requirements Engineering tool. The goal is to relate user stories
to a requirements document. Some systems go as far as relating requirements
to code... Serena calls their documentation a "prototype" and that's a tad
misleading. I would call what their tool does a "mock-up" But, that might be
the uniqueness of their product. It is both a mockup tool and a requirements
management tool.

Without thinking too hard Serena probably competes with:

Borland Caliber Analyst
http://www.borland.com/us/products/caliber/index.html
 * (see story boarding)
http://www.borland.com/media/en/edm/caliber_analyst_product_demo/index.html

Rational software
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/offerings/reqanalysis.html
 * http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/announce/rrc/ ... as usual IBM
sucks at marketing their tools.

... and googling around on software requirements prototyping and rapid web
prototyping gets...
http://www.rallydev.com/products/demo_center/
http://www.analysttool.com/
http://www.mockupscreens.com/
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1058664.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/rapid_prototyping.html

Unless you are planning on doing "proto-permanent" (where you just deploy
the prototype and call it good) I can't imagine that J2EE or Struts2 would
make a difference. The most important point to remember is that you have
three distinct activities... producing a protoype/mockup... managing
requirements documentation... producing an application. These are
complimentary but distinct goals with separate artefacts.

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Tim Jowers <[email protected]> wrote:

> Does anyone have a recommendation for a prototyping tool?
>
> I'm research prototyping tools for my company and have been advised to look
> at
> http://www.serena.com/products/prototype-composer/home.html
>
> Serena looks nice: it is wysiwig. drag-n-drop, with many field types such
> as date input, and, most of all, an abliity to track requirements as screens
> are prototyping.
>
> OTOH, netbeans lets you drag and drop jMaki components so could effect
> something similar sans requirements.
>
> OTOH, Flex Builder lets you drag and drop Flash components so gives you the
> best GUI experience possible to date. Yet no requirements tracking.
>
> The latter two could possibly produce real, usable artifacts for the dev
> team.
>
> My big challenge is our product gets embedded into corporate webapps so
> must be vanilla, customizable technology. Flash is out. Today is it <table>
> based so x,y positioning (Div, wysiwig drag-n-drop) is hard or at least a
> sea of change.
>
> Does anyone have a recommendation for a prototyping tool which makes sense
> for a very large (>2M LOC) J2EE project which is still moving to Struts 2?
>
> Thanks!
> tim
>
>
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/** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/  //*/

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