Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The Rapid Development Revolution

The way in which we design web sites is changing. We are constantly be faced with tighter deadlines, more functionality, quicker turn around on changes. The ones who can turn the sites around quickly are the ones who will dominate the market. There is no reason why this cannot be done. There are many products that currently exist that allow engineers to bring sites to market quicker then ever before. Turn around of weeks instead of months is more typical. Repeating the development process for ideas that have already been fleshed out insane. Why reconstruct every project that is within your company over and over continuing to eat resource when you can leverage the time it takes to build a site?

Many times software is considered to be a reoccurring cost in the process of staying competitive. This does not have to be the case. Software can be a fixed cost if it is done well up front. There will always be some modifications that need to be made along the way, but why do these modification need to take so long? We should be able to make software a one time cost then the only maintenance required will be the investment into new ideas.

However, in order to accomplish this process it requires an initial investment to restructure something in a way that will be maintainable. The applications that lead to this easily being done will be the ones that survive. This is the software development revolution where everything will be light weight, modifiable and maintainable. These new application will save time and money in the software engineering process. Rails needs this application process to enable rapid development of dynamic content. In walks the rapid development Ruby on Rails environment from ACE computing.

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