Construction Engineering Management Document Control Rapid Application Development Tools - An Objective Study

This paper examines the issues which arise when a business is considering in-house development of a mission critical software application when an off the shelf package is available. The conditions where this might arise are when the application replicates a common procedure. Does in-house application development make commercial sense? What are the inherent risks? What are the available tools? What other issues should be taken into consideration? The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the issues and an objective comparison of the major database development tools currently available. The benefits and shortcomings of each tool is analysed in turn.