The rise of the local web application
I do a lot of data backups on CDs and DVDs, and I recently realized that I had no organized way of figuring out which files were located on which discs. Rather than looking for a piece of management software, I decided it would be easier to just write an app myself in Ruby on Rails.
Nowadays, agile development methodologies like such as Ruby on Rails allow you to development applications so quickly, that it’s often easier to write code yourself, even if a similar tool already exists.
Imagine if I had tried to use an existing tool to manage my backups, rather than do it myself. I would needed to take the time to:
- Research available tools and determine which one fits my needs
- Setup and install the program
- Customize it for my needs and environment
- Learn to use it
During the time it takes to complete these tasks, it’s just as easy (and frankly more fun) to code an app myself, which will be customized to my exact needs from the beginning, and requires no learning time.
As agile development becomes more and more used, I think this “do-it-yourself” practice will also become more common. Certainly for system administrators, who already spend time writing customized scripts and GUI apps. This is the topic of a recent IBM developerWorks article, Develop Web applications for local use, which encourages web application development in place of GUI or command-line applications.
An added benefit of this practice is that the developer might discover that the application fills a need felt by others, and can turn their local webapp into an actual website or product. That’s how RSP started. It started development as a tool to use internally, before we discovered that it could have a use to the outside world.
