Vanenburg welcomes the release of Duet AI, which can serve as a complement to its Rappit product to boost productivity within enterprise application development.
Recently, Google launched Duet AI for developers, which “can help provide developers with real-time code suggestions, chat assistance, and enterprise-focused customization”.
We are excited about the use cases that this new technology from Google can address, as it perfectly complements Rappit, Vanenburg’s application development accelerator for enterprise applications.
How Rappit generates code
Using Rappit, business consultants are able to gather requirements in a structured and unstructured way, as is common practice in requirements workshops. Based on these collected requirements, the design of user roles in the app, the data model, pages, navigation and workflows, Rappit then generates the required back-end services, translation labels, among other things, as well as the application source code in Java and Angular. As Rappit is an “opinionated software system” suitable for business applications, it improves productivity with the help of several built-in features that are well-suited to enterprise apps, and also generates code which is based on best practices for these types of applications. This is distinctly different from tools like Duet AI, given that Duet AI’s foundation model is not necessarily geared toward enterprise applications.
Apart from the features provided by Rappit, or indeed by any application development tool, each application usually also has certain requirements that go beyond or differ from what is provided by the app development tool. The tool needs to provide developers with enough flexibility to create these features for the application to truly benefit end users in the way it should. One of the key features and advantages of Rappit is that it allows full flexibility and freedom for developers to add their own application-specific custom code over and above the code generated automatically by Rappit.
How Duet AI complements Rappit in application development
This custom code is entered by developers into their own preferred tools, for example, combinations of Source Code Control Systems, such as GitLab / GitHub, as well as IDEs, such as Eclipse, VS Code, etc. These popular development tools are now increasingly incorporating more and more support for AI features (e.g., Copilot in GitHub / VS Code IDE), which help developers boost productivity during the development of their code. Rappit application developers can use these tools wherever they want to add custom code to Rappit-generated source code. Rappit application developers can use Copilot and Duet AI for the complementary features that these tools provide, such as code/boilerplate generation, inline code completion, and code explanation, or to generate code for end-user features, such as chat assistance, etc.
Even though Google Duet AI and Microsoft’s Copilot are rival products, both products can be seen as complementary to Rappit. Developers can use either tool to boost their productivity in the custom coding component of Rappit application development.
So, while Rappit helps to improve the productivity of consultants and developers by being an opinionated software system for enterprise applications and by generating code based on best practices, Duet AI / Copilot and other AI tools can be used for custom code add-ons to Rappit-generated applications. All in all, from end-to-end, the combination of Rappit plus the latest tools for generative AI will boost overall developer productivity significantly.
The democratization and improved productivity of enterprise application development are gaining momentum, benefitting business and developers alike. This is a win-win for all stakeholders in the enterprise application sphere.
