AJAX FROM PAGE 9Software, a developer of hospitality res-
ing have placed in developers’ hands. ervations software, has put his faith in
Developers can stave off offshore competi- Alpha 5.
tion by leveraging things such as AJAX to “We have made a strategic decision
createinteractiveandrich Internetapplica- to shift our entire development efforts
tions and RAD (rapid application develop- completely to Web 2.0/DHTML [Dynamic
ment) for faster development. HTML] and AJAX using Alpha 5,” Thom-
Combined with the emerging delivery son says. “We have already produced an
method of SAAS (software as a service), on-screen reservation calendar complete
these new tools are starting to transform with drag-and-drop resizing grips. All
the development landscape and how cus- functions are controlled by a single page
tomers buy software. using tabbed page layouts and divisions,
which are populated dynamically by AJAX
SAAS, at last at run-time. This means that we never
once touted as the wave of the future, have to refresh or render a complete page
SAAS was dreamed up by ASPs (appli- Thibeault: Clients are spending “mad money” and that the performance of our product is
cation service providers) as a method to link Web 2.0 applications with legacy better and more versatile than the desktop
to lease software to users without the systems. approach.”
encumbrances of traditional client/server application. The application is available Marc Huizer, CEO of Ayton, a Moor-
applications. For application developers, as a “local host” solution, meaning that drecht, Netherlands-based ISV, discov-
ASPs proved SAAS could work but the customers bring the cloud computing ered Servoy, a cross-platform application
model required significant investment method on site and host it internally. development tool and deployment envi-
in hardware, bandwidth and resources ronment, when the company decided to
beyondthereachofthetypicalapplication New tools, new methods make the leap into SAAS for its health
developer. web 2.0 technologies haveintroduced care application. “When we developed a
What’s more, businesses that needed a multitude of businesses to the concept new version of our application last year,
customized applications did not want to of cloud computing, but in doing so, they our platform vendor recommended that
pay for development costs and ongoing haveaddedtouncertaintyaboutthefuture we go to a SAAS model,” Huizer says.
fees to access their own wares that started of application development. The problem “Our initial response was: ‘That doesn’t
to change once new development tools is that Web 2.0 (or even Web 3.0) is often work in our industry.’”
and cloud-computing concepts entered considered a technology in itself, when But Huizer changed his mind after
the mainstream, making Web-deployed in fact it is simply a term that defines the seeing how easy Servoy made delivering
apps feasible in most situations. Internet as a platform. the application in the SAAS format. “So
Chris Peterson, CEO of solution pro- The real power of Web 2.0 comes we started to mention SAAS capabilities
vider Christian James of San Francisco, from the tools and techniques that allow in our sales process,” he says. “To our
says there are visible benefits to combin- users to run software applications entirely surprise, there is huge interest in SAAS
ing cloud computing with SAAS. through a browser. The reason Web 2.0 even in the health care field. All I can say
“SAAS and RAD allow us to save our and associated technologies areimportant to other ISVs is choose SAAS, and also
customers from their own IT shortcom- to application developersis that interactive make sure you choose a platform that
ings,” Peterson says. “Most people aren’t Web-basedapplications donot necessarily makes it easy to offer both.”
any good at managing their data and the have to be located on the Web. Web-based While development tools such as Servoy
security of it. We’ve noticed that it is still applications can be hosted on local/inter- are important in themselves, some devel-
far too common to come across an on- nal servers, over which administrators opers are moreinterestedin theparadigm
premise software user who has had their havecompletecontrol. What’s more, locat- shift that is taking place as Web develop-
computer go down and lost months worth ing those applications inside the firewall ment encroaches on the enterprise.
of data. RAD allows us to create powerful greatly enhances security. Keven M. Thibeault, CEO of Logical
apps in-house that benefit our custom- There are many tools on the market Design, a CRMandmiddlewarespecialist
ers, and SAAS allows us to manage the today that enable application developers in Newburyport, Mass., with more than
security of the data.” to make the transition to browser-based 20 years in the industry, says the use of
Peterson’s premier product is PayGo- applications, and each tool has its fans. AJAX and Java-enabled tools has become
SaaS.com, a hosted POS (point of sale) Mike Thomson, director of Alpha One commonplace in the enterprise.
