Grady Booch

olks who develop software for corporations owe Grady Booch.

Booch is one of the original developers, along with Ivar Jacobson and Jim Rumbaugh, of the Unified Modeling Language and the UML-based Rational Rose development tools. IBM bought Rational and that toolset lock, stock and barrel last year for more than $2 billion.

Booch, a native Texan who's been working with computers for nearly 40 years since he built his first computer at the age of 12, has said his goal is to eliminate "the points of pain" in computer systems that run the world. He is apparently an ambitious man.

Solution providers that deal in the intricacies of corporate software development say modeling lets them build on previous expertise to bring new products to the fore. "[Booch] is the father of the current and, arguably, future of enterprise application development," says Richard Warren, chief solutions architect at Susquehanna Systems, a Winchester, Va.-based solution provider.

Booch's notion of UML "was at the core of the entire modeling effort that is only now coming into full bloom after the longest damn gestation period of any major trend," Warren adds. "Modeling captures the essential elements of an application and applies certain normalities across similar applications. This cuts down on hard programming and lets applications follow proven patterns, saving iterations and saving time."

Critical to that concept is the acceptance that nearly everything that's been written for computers is at least somewhat like something else that has been written before. The question then becomes, why not leverage that prior intellectual art and apply the same pattern to the new work?

IBM's WebSphere product line has taken the UML message to heart, and it is likely Microsoft will do the same in future iterations of its toolsets for Windows. Booch and his development cadre at Rational took what had been a bunch of individual methodologies and brought them together with a notation system that developers can now use to build better applications faster, Warren notes.