Strategy Letter VI - Joel on Software

Francois found this article just as we were discussing these issues in the office yesterday, it's very on topic with what we're going through as a development team.

Trying to standardize and make our application backwards compatible with other browsers is killing us. The fact that we're pioneering a new UI in addition to creating a CRM / CMS and the other features that we're trying for ... adding in creating a "flat" UI (as we call it internally) is making our development schedule take a nose dive, and often making us redo things as the UI is inconsistent across the application, or we need to then spend time getting it to work in Safari and then each IE whatever.whatever.

It's just not feasible for a small team like ours over the long term, it would be great to have a "lab" to develop a lot of this stuff with, but in reality... we need to just focus on the application design, not web standards... other people should do that as part of a larger tool set.

Strategy Letter VI - Joel on Software: "So if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows. Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API."

With that in mind, and after a fair bit of research into the various JS libraries that are out there now, we've decided to adopt the EXT.JS library as part of our tool.

It's going to make life easier going forward, but will require at least a few weeks of work to roll all of the stuff we've done thus far into the EXT framework. I'm excited about the functionality that I believe it will add to our application, it will bring us much closer to the "desktop feel" that we've been shooting for.