[Lazarus] Lazarus make me create better apps

[Joost van der Sluis]

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 07:40 -0700, Myles Wakeham wrote:
> Bee wrote:
>  >What framework do you need to build web apps using pascal? Web apps is 
> just
>  > about read browser request and reply to it. A custom simple communication
>  > class (to encapsulate the request-reply process) should be sufficient.
> 
> Maybe for a web application with a small number of pages/options, sure. 
>   But not for larger scale business type web solutions.  Here's the 
> problem - there is a distinct distance between doing what is 'right' 
> (ie. developing in Laz/FPC for web apps) and doing what is 
> 'environmentally & economically compatible'.  I'm in the USA, and here 
> it is about being able to offer development services competitively on 
> price and time.  I've had numerous clients come to me that paid a very 
> small amount of money to have some hack developer write a MS Access 
> solution for their small business, and then they open a 2nd office in 
> another state, or expand the number of users on the application beyond 
> the limits of Access and want to have the application re-developed as a 
> web application.  These are typically high data throughput business 
> database applications, with 50+ major data entities, etc.

Maybe you should tell them that if they want to grow even further, or
want to change something. It's more profitable to let you do that work
then the php-party they want to work on now.

> platforms.  There's clearly advantages in Laz/FPC for this part, but 
> convincing the IT managers that your code is ok on their servers when 
> its not written in something they commonly encounter (ie. ASP.NET, PHP, 
> etc.) is an obstacle.  They are wary of CGIs because they don't 
> understand what is going on there, and this is yet another obstacle to 
> overcome.

The IT managers that you can convince, can show better results to their
bosses in the end. 

> But being competitive is hard.  I have other developers offering coding 
> work at about 50% of the price that we do the work for, and I'm a 25+ 
> year experienced software engineer so you'd think that I could do the 
> work in half the time of a less experienced developer.  But the problem 
> is simply that using Visual Studio/ASP is a 'quick & dirty' way to get 
> the job done and many of these clients, particularly small businesses, 
> seem to be willing to accept that since they really have no internal 
> knowledge of software development and rely on the consultants to tell 
> them what is best for them.  They ultimately judge the options on price 
> & time to develop.  Also in the Microsoft world, often the programming 
> work is done at cost or a loss, but they make their money up on systems 
> maintenance, server licensing, hardware, etc. since it requires such a 
> beast to run the app on, and constant security monitoring, anti-virus, 
> etc. which can be charged to the client on an ongoing basis.

Tell your clients that most IT-projects fail. When finished they don't
do what was promised in the beginning, simply because the requirements
were not ok. There are a lot of methods out there to handle such cases.

But whatever project-management-method you use here. If you write
proper, structured, code, the result is more flexible and you can change
your program according to your (new) client wishes. This improves the
changes of success (a web application that is satisfactory to your
users) a lot. 

When you use php/VS/ASP as you explained above. Just click-click-click
ready, it won't be flexible. That's what you have to win the competition
with.

Joost.