In this interview with Artima, David Intersimone, Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist at CodeGear, discusses the role of designing software using visual tools as opposed to coding.

Read this Leading-Edge Java article:

http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/javaone_2007_david_intersimone.html

When do you think it is appropriate to use a visual tool versus coding? In what ways have you used visual tools in the past that have worked well or not worked well?

It sounds like Borland finally incorporated the functionality from Together into JBuilder.

I would go even farther than just that you should be able work in text or in graphics. The primary representation of the code should be in text. Not in XML or in a database table. Text files that you can look at in any basic text editor. The graphical tools should be a secondary concern.

Anyone who has ever had to repair corrupted code-data for a graphical tool would agree, I believe.

I like visual development, it certainly has a place amongst dev tools. I would like to see a data-driven visual development though, where the programmer graphically specifies processing paths of data, where processing nodes are algorithms, GUIs and databases. It would certainly simplify lots of business-type applications.