Dictation is an open source English based language for describing business applications. Using Dictation, one can describe in plain English how your business works. We can then take that description and rapidly generate working software from it. Dictation can describe your business down to the lowest levels, even including your operation’s audit and security concerns.

The best thing about Dictation is how easy it is to read and write. You do not have to be technically savvy to fully understand Dictation. It looks and sounds just like plain English! Take a look at the following example of Dictation paragraphs that describe a customer, her order, and the line items in the order.

A Customer
has a nick name
has a full name
has a date of birth
has a social security number which is sensitive
can be viewed or created or changed by a customer service representative

An Order
belongs to a Customer
has a description
can be viewed or created or changed by a customer service representative

An Order Line Item is audited
belongs to an Order
has a description
has a price which is a number
can be viewed or created or changed by a customer service representative

After describing your business using Dictation requirements as shown above, we can then generate software that will support a fully functional order taking application. The generated software will understand that customers have orders, orders have line items, and that any changes to an order’s line items should be recorded. Also the software will automatically encrypt the customer’s social security number as it is deemed to be sensitive information.

We estimate that using Dictation along with Airlift, our open source cloud based web application framework, we can reduce a typical web application project’s execution time by 50% or more.