Ease of development depends on what kind of application you are developing, your timeline/budget, and liklihood of needing to change the behavior of your application in the future. If you are developing a relatively simple application that probably won’t change, OpenLexicon may not be the tool you need. On the other hand, if your time is short, or believe the customer will have evolving requirements, OpenLexicon might be exactly what you are looking for. Here’s an example:

Suppose you are developing an application where one of the business rules is that a customer must have prepaid for their order. Your application probably has a method named something like ‘isPrePaid’ that returns a Boolean. Likewise you probably have an if-statement that only continues order processing if the order is prepaid (or returns an error if the order isn’t prepaid, etc.). Suppose the customer guiding the requirements later institutes a new payment method where an order can be processed on credit. Now, even though you’ve followed good design methods you will still need at some point to find the if-statement that is governing the order behavior and change it. This will of course require you to recompile and redeploy the entire application. In OpenLexicon, all you need to do is edit the one business rule that governs the order behavior, edit it, generate a new metadata cache file, and deploy only that cache file. It is much easier to track and change application behavior with OpenLexicon than it is with source code.