The Big Lie

So what is the big lie you should be asking yourself?  It is the fact that taking applications from the green screen to the web is easy and/or fast.  All of the software vendors sell this.  Here are some gleaned from their current web pages.

"...provides a wealth of end-user capabilities allowing the developer to rapidly create feature-rich, high performance applications.."

'Rapid application development for multivalue"

Web development can be fast and easy if you are converting or creating a simple screen.  Simple screens it turns out are a significant number of the forms that are done, however, they compromise only 5 to 15 percent of the time of development.

Lets talk about normal forms and where the time is spent.  Depending on which tool you use, some of your time is divided in setting up the objects to allow the translation of variables from Universe and Unidata to the web, and designing the form or re-designing the form to fit the web.  The rest of you time is either writing the JavaScript to run the custom features you want and modify or writing from scratch the UniBasic subroutine that handles the business logic.  For example, business logic might be where we are allowed to buy this dollar amount from this vendor or only these particular products.

The last part of Web development that no brochure or web page talks about is debugging the four headed monster you just created.  It is the UniBasic code, JavaScript, HTML, or objects that are causing my form to function unexpectedly.  A good rule of thumb is them more complex the form, the more complex the debugging.

Here is the figure you should use on most Web form development.  For example, if this form took about 20 hours to develop count on 40 to 60 hours to debug, pass quality assurance, and client approval.

BTW: U2logic's XLr8Developer hardly ever uses the word rapid to describe the web development process.  If we do we are speaking of those code file Web entry forms.

What your web site says about you

It has been almost 2 years since we overhauled our web site and it was time to do again.  I have been visiting web sites with my iPad2 to see what others in the industry are doing.  Some worked well for the iPad format some did not work at all.  I'm not even going to talk about the Flash sites which could be a whole blog itself.

I ran across a competitor's web site that sells a resize tool like U2logic's XLr8Resizer for the Universe and Unidata databases.  I right clicked using that handy dandy option where you can see the source code.  Low and behold their web site was written using Microsoft's Front Page 4.0.  I knew this site was ancient because of the references to Windows NT and Windows 2000, but how do you get a tool to run from 1996.  You don't, you just don't update your web site.

Now to answer my question proposed in the title.  What does your web site say about you?  In the above case it says you are hopeless out of touch with what is going on and you want to milk all of your users for technology that was good enough 10 to 15 years ago.

That my friends is why we are constantly updating our web site. Today our web site uses jquery and some free software that allows the web site to show a slide show.  The site even supports accordion views of data.  All of this was tested on Firefox, Chrome, IE and the iPad.

Our web site does reflect that we constantly keep our Eclipse based XLr8 tools upgraded and relevant as technology changes and users preferences evolve.  Check us out at www.u2logic.com and see if web site reflects our commitment to excellence.

When a game changer is only in my mind

Somewhere in the last 7 years or so of playing with Eclipse IDE for U2 (Universe and Unidata), I have come up with a lot of ideas that did not pan out.  Rather than go through all of them, let us focus on the one that was just introduced called continuous compile for our XLr8Editor.

I thought if you can see your coding errors while you type, it would help you to be a better programmer.   I thought if you could see what variables are unassigned or functions you did not finish or even just bad code, this would be a game changer.  I thought if programmers could save an hour a week which equated to 12 minutes a day; this would translate in a whole bunch of sales of our XLr8Editor.

Maybe the technology is too foreign or maybe the technology needs to be explained.  Continuous compile does not compile your current code you are working on.  It compiles a temporary version and maps the errors on to your current code every 500 milliseconds or when you stop typing.  Most users of the tool do not know it even is happening until they have a typo or bad syntax.

Well, I have to admit it now, I was wrong.  I thought those CIO's, IT Managers, Programmer Managers would be clamoring for tools that costs $49.00 per programmer per year including maintenance and support, but would save them hundreds of dollars per week or per month.

I still stand by the XLr8Editor for U2 databases as the only tool that really saves you money.  So for those of us using this in my mind game changer we know, but the rest of you have no idea what this tool can do for you.