On-demand app/dev? Not yet. But closer.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with Tony De la Lama, senior vice president of research and development for San Francisco-based Embarcadero Technologies Inc. Among the many thought-provoking observations he made, one caught my attention.

He said that "on-demand tooling" for software developers was in the offing because programmers "do not need access to tooling all of the time."

With the exception of penetration-testing services for (mostly) Web applications, currently, the app/dev market consists of lots of LAN-based or PC-based tools that run on-premises and are bought upfront. For example, you may not need or use a code profiler or a SQL data modeler every day or even every week. Still, when you want a tool, you generally want it now.

Wouldn't it be nice to get the tool on-demand and only pay for its use? Well, that's not possible yet, but there are baby steps being taken in the industry.

Replay Solutions Inc. in Redwood City, Calif. now offers Replay Cloud that, according to Jonathan Lindo, CEO, lets you record activity of an application in test. When it crashes (What? Your new apps don't crash?) the Replay software captures everything that was being done at the time of the crash. The recording is then put into Cloud Relay where it is analyzed by developers. This is ideal when you have development occurring in one time zone and testing in another. Lindo claims it answers the "why" of the crash process around 80% of the time, thus saving programmers oodles of time diagnosing the problem.

At iTKO Inc. in Dallas the company's LISA product lets you tests services (in the cloud or in your data center) virtually. Chief Geek John Michelsen says LISA watches how your app interacts with a given service over time, then it creates a virtual instance of the service with all of its behavioral quirks and features that you can test as often as you like. Michelsen claims it is unrealistic for a developer to test against a live service.

In my view, both the Replay and iTKO offerings could be ready as SaaS tools with on-demand access and pricing. It's a business decision by those companies to market them just shy of full-blown SaaS tools.

So, while De La Lama's prediction is not fully realized yet, it will be. And soon, I'm betting.