Cathedron+Firebrid = Winners of RAD Race 2008/2009
The combination of Cathedron and Firebird competed and won two times: this year and in 2004. During the 14 hour race a team of two people solve a realistic business problem.
The productivity during the race is about 10 minutes per function point. In large software companies the best projects require 6 to 10 hours per function point. This implies a 60 times higher productivity during the race. When the extreme conditions of the race are normalized and you triple the amount of time to fine tune and test the deliverables, the productivity is still 5 to 10 times higher.
The combination of Cathedron and Firebird allowed the team to rapidly create and change the basic application and the underlying database. During the 14 hour race over 70 small modifications where made to a database containing valuable test data! 99% of those changes were handled by Cathedron simply by changing the data model.
Cathedron can be downloaded from www.cathedron.com and is free for personal and educational use. Although the tool and documentation are still under development, the core features such as information/data modeling, (default) screen generation and the embedded Pascal scripts have been used in production environments for over 8 years.