jeviathon

The average developer when they hear the word Nacar, they ask what it is and how it works. For the experienced developer in Madrid, Spain, Nacar is the money maker that keeps you employed. Nacar is a Java development tool created by Accenture Spain around 10 years ago. It was originally designed as a tool for developing GUI interfaces and it was retrofitted to be able to support web applications. Pesado is the Swing GUI portion and Ligero is the Web client portion.
10 years ago Nacar was an advancement in development, but unfortunately Accenture didn’t keep up with it and integrate open source standards. Today, Nacar is still in use by Accenture, Everis and BBVA Spain. BBVA is a large bank based out of Madrid with a small presence in the states. They were the first to use Nacar and it probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for them commissioning it.
Even today Accenture touts that this is the best Java development platform, but there is little about it today that is modern. It is actually quite antiquated, has many limitations and requires a small army of people to develop and maintain applications in it. It’s a perfect tool if you are billing by the hour because in comparison to open standards like Spring, Struts or just plain J2EE development, it takes 2-3 times as long to develop applications with it.
The Nacar developer has two components at their disposal. The Visual Nacar component which allows users to drag and drop Views/Windows and services and it has a piece that plugs into Rational Application Developer that allows you to use some custom tags that are in the framework. The custom tags are extremely limited and don’t provide much value.
While you have to admit this all sounds good. The learning curve for Nacar is steep. It takes a couple months to be productive at best. The framework is entirely owned and developed by Accenture with some involvement from the BBVA architecture group in Madrid. This doesn’t lend itself for anyone outside of Accenture to be able to help in a time of need and it allows Accenture to charge whatever they want for a developer in Nacar since noone else has the expertise. Everis is another company that has accrued some Nacar knowledge, but I doubt there are very far removed from Accenture.
The problems really start to add up for Nacar when you factor in that they are still stuck on JDK 1.4. Everything is pretty much home-rolled. There are absolutely no standard libraries. Even for simple functions, Nacar has its own code. Nacar supports Web services by actually converting a map representation to Soap that supports no particular Web Service standards. It doesn’t support namespace alias. It just puts the namespace into every tag making the Soap process slow and unwieldy. Instead of just using JAX-WS or some type of generated client, the developers try to generate all the Soap themselves manually.
In Nacar, there is not really an idea of separation and modular design. All of the apps run on a single server and they all share common code, preventing you from being able to isolate a single app for upgrade. Instead of simple J2EE modules like an ear and a war, it is a manual deployment process to Web Sphere for each app. This is also a holdover from the pre J2EE days.

To top it all off, the end product is really poor. The limitations in the tools leave the user experience lacking. The apps look like apps did 10 years ago. Again this was great back then, but in an Ajax-driven, dynamic development world we are in now, this just doesn’t cut it.

Overall of the many projects I have worked on, this was by far the ugliest framework I have ever seen and unfortunately, it continues to be used and maintained. When I worked in it, a fellow coworker came up with a great nickname for it… Nacrap…