Introduction
All software applications in widespread use on today's personal computers, tablets, mobile phones or the web were produced using software development technologies that have been largely unchanged since the earliest days of digital computers. Although there has been explosive growth in the capabilities and use of computing devices the process of developing sophisticated new software has largely remained a complex and expensive undertaking with many inherent risks and difficulties.
These issues mean that a lot of software is not really fit for purpose and doesn't meet the requirements of the users. Even worse, many software development projects are either never completed or do not work as intended and as a result are often cancelled. Unfinished software projects, or software not fit for purpose, can lead to a huge waste of money/resources and to a reduction in business productivity.
The crude nature of existing software development techniques is shown by the fact that the majority of applications are distributed as large unalterable files of machine code that cannot be improved in any way and cannot tell a user, other applications or the operating system anything about their capabilities or what information they require to interact with.
In contrast to the situation with most current software, all parts of an Adapt application are able to be interactively viewed, analysed and modified as required both by a designer and by other applications. There is no programming language involved and all the features and capabilities of the application can be explored and changed interactively with the possible options at any point being presented graphically. At any time the effect and impact of changes can be analysed.
The remarkable potential of the Adapt technology is largely derived from a number of important principles (see Intellectual Property). The most important of these principals is Total Design Knowledge and this means that an Adapt application is held as a 'pure application definition'; i.e. the definition of the capabilities of the application is held in a structured form that is independent of a particular type of device or method of deployment; i.e. it is a pure description of the functions and operations of the application. When the application is accessed on a particular system then it automatically adapts itself to that environment.
The existence of Total Design Knowledge means that applications on a particular system are able to automatically interrogate each other in order to better integrate their capabilities together and to provide a more reliable/consistent service to users.
Conventional software applications, on whatever platform they exist upon, are all largely fixed in what they do and how they operate. Some allow a certain degree of customisation but only to the extent that the original designers felt was appropriate and this means that a user is limited to the set of features designed into the original product and is unable to add new features or significantly modify existing ones.
Almost always the original designers of today's software were forced by the development technologies employed to take decisions that imposed firm limitations on what future changes could be made without rewriting the software from scratch. A principal objective of the design of Adapt has been to allow powerful applications to be developed without imposing arbitrary limits on what future changes can be made and thus allowing continual application development and evolution.