Is there a Dinosaur sitting next to you?

Sometime in the near future you will look at your coding partner, or your fellow programmers, or even your boss and wonder if you are ever going to start coding like you live in this century.  It is something we must do every now and then when people find out you are coding in BASIC.  Really UniBasic is not Dartmouth BASIC which was created in 1964.  No we are using a language related to Data/Basic from its big commercialization in 1973.  It has some similar conventions as Dartmouth BASIC and the same thing can be said of JavaScript and Java.

If you write programs that, for example have variable names like "A" or "B", then the dinosaur is not sitting next to you, it is you.

If you cannot spell out the word count and use CNT or CT, then extinction might be right around the corner.

If we cannot name programs to match the functionality calling them Wh200 which should be something like Warehouse_EDI_Subroutine, then you are becoming a DoDo bird.

If you continually use archaic tools like AE (Alternative Editor), ED (Editor), or plethora of the other names strategically not mentioned, then you may find our self's looking for a job in a shrinking environment.

If you have seen the word "Version Control" but think you should save the old version of the program in a file called BP.OLD, the world is getting a lot colder than you realize.

If think that your editor should not be auto correcting as you type, then you cannot see the forest through the trees and maybe the T-Rex will not get you.

If we think that your manager does not know anything of how you do what you do, then you are in for a long winter this summer.

At U2logic, we are enjoying ourselves with state of the art tools and processes, so we are neither too cold or too hot.  Check us out at our web page at www.u2logic.com/tools.html.

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.