In a world where “the new new thing” is king and longevity is often slightly suspect, it’s startling to think that we’ve now been building web applications since before the turn of the century. Our current applications and business have evolved to the point where there’s scant (if any) mention of those early efforts on our current website, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine! A quick glance back to this page from April 2000 shows some of the projects that we’d taken live for customers by then, including a web-based travel and expense system.
When we began developing our current product offerings shortly after that, there was no question about it: they’d be web applications. Even if most of our customers weren’t ready to put their entire financial and/or manufacturing system(s) in a virtualized environment, it seemed to us that the writing was on the wall. We wanted to develop for the new century.
The move to the cloud has changed our approach in many ways, but it’s important to remember some of the very basic differences between today and yesterday. For starters, the shift from client/server access to a web app model means that only what’s required goes to the client. In other words, the client’s machine is no longer required for computing power. Even more importantly, the shift to using the browser as a web interface has re-set users’ expectations of what they can expect from web applications and what the experience of using a web applications should be like. In some ways, the key question that we asked ourselves was: “How do we create more of a web/consumer product experience in our business management applications?” For example, we work at making everything no more than 3 clicks away, and we make sure that the basics are there, like a back button that takes you back.
Building web applications today is all about building applications the way that they need to be built to optimize the world of on-demand cloud systems. A little experience doing this definitely doesn’t hurt!
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