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Sorry, I don't have an answer; but I do have a question :) Why rewrite the thing in the first place? It's not too late to trash the Ruby on Rails project and fo

Sorry, I don't have an answer; but I do have a question :) Why rewrite the thing in the first place? It's not too late to trash the Ruby on Rails project and focus your effort on improving your current asset (the Windows app).

inklesspen 19y ago
By my understanding, the Windows app is written in an obsolete language and is requiring more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working -- sort of a Red Queen effect. We could certainly scrap it and rewrite in .NET, but our past experiences with .NET have been less than positive. In addition, we're pretty far from a startup hub; even though we're not a startup, this is a problem, because we want to find expert hackers, not just average .NET programmers. So in that respect, Ruby on Rails is good for us because the few Rails programmers we do find are better than nearly all the .NET programmers we would find, and there's fewer resumes and interviews to go through.
- corentin 19y ago
  If it requires more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working, it probably means that your organization can't manage a software project; either because your developers are not experienced or, more likely, because management doesn't understand software development (you're not alone; few companies truly master software development). Hence, it's probably not a language problem and switching to Ruby on Rails won't solve it in the long run.
  - inklesspen 19y ago
    This is probably the case, yeah, but I don't have the leverage to get this changed. I'm leaving the company myself in in about five months.
mechanical_fish 19y ago
I hate to mod this up, but, darn it, I have to mod this up. Web apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps written with web-app technologies have... cons. The interface is limited to what the browser can support. There are more moving parts. You have to worry about synchronizing the data. You have to worry about pushing out upgrades. You have the same support costs as any Windows desktop app, and worse, because you're supporting a system that nobody else has ever seen because you wrote it yourself. Etc. Etc. Of all your ideas, the Asus-eee one seems the best -- just make the customers buy hardware with the software preinstalled. If they screw it up, have them mail it in for a new one. If the eee gets discontinued, find another small OEM Linux PC and port the software over. If you go the vmware route you might as well be selling and supporting an installable Windows app, which you already are. But the idea is still crazy. Customers are not stupid. They know the difference between a full-featured Windows app and a web app that has been crippled by cutting off the Web part. You're going to throw away all the advantages of moving to webapps in the first place, and invest mighty engineering effort, all to replace a Windows program with a program that (from the non-networked customer's perspective) does the same thing but with a different, feature-poor browser-based interface. That non-networked 25% of your user base is likely to respond by either (a) demanding that you continue to support the Windows version; (b) switching to a competitor's Windows- or Mac- or Linux-based product; or (c) buying some networking, and joining the other 75% of the customers. Once that process has shaken down, you'll be left holding an expensive, tricky Slingshot-esque technology that has almost no users.
- inklesspen 19y ago
  "Buying some networking"? I admit I wasn't exactly clear with what the app does, but in the iPhone section I did say the app has to be used in places where there's no cell phone service, let alone wifi. It's an app used by public health agencies, who _have_ to be able to visit clients in their homes and chart their progress. And plenty of homes in the rural US have no dial-up internet, no broadband, no wi-fi, and no cell-phone coverage, and no sign of that changing soon. That said, I agree with you. The decision-maker at this company doesn't, and as I mentioned below, I've got little leverage to change things.

inklesspen 19y ago

By my understanding, the Windows app is written in an obsolete language and is requiring more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working -- sort of a Red Queen effect. We could certainly scrap it and rewrite in .NET, but our past experiences with .NET have been less than positive. In addition, we're pretty far from a startup hub; even though we're not a startup, this is a problem, because we want to find expert hackers, not just average .NET programmers. So in that respect, Ruby on Rails is good for us because the few Rails programmers we do find are better than nearly all the .NET programmers we would find, and there's fewer resumes and interviews to go through.

corentin 19y ago
If it requires more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working, it probably means that your organization can't manage a software project; either because your developers are not experienced or, more likely, because management doesn't understand software development (you're not alone; few companies truly master software development). Hence, it's probably not a language problem and switching to Ruby on Rails won't solve it in the long run.
- inklesspen 19y ago
  This is probably the case, yeah, but I don't have the leverage to get this changed. I'm leaving the company myself in in about five months.

mechanical_fish 19y ago

I hate to mod this up, but, darn it, I have to mod this up. Web apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps written with web-app technologies have... cons. The interface is limited to what the browser can support. There are more moving parts. You have to worry about synchronizing the data. You have to worry about pushing out upgrades. You have the same support costs as any Windows desktop app, and worse, because you're supporting a system that nobody else has ever seen because you wrote it yourself. Etc. Etc. Of all your ideas, the Asus-eee one seems the best -- just make the customers buy hardware with the software preinstalled. If they screw it up, have them mail it in for a new one. If the eee gets discontinued, find another small OEM Linux PC and port the software over. If you go the vmware route you might as well be selling and supporting an installable Windows app, which you already are. But the idea is still crazy. Customers are not stupid. They know the difference between a full-featured Windows app and a web app that has been crippled by cutting off the Web part. You're going to throw away all the advantages of moving to webapps in the first place, and invest mighty engineering effort, all to replace a Windows program with a program that (from the non-networked customer's perspective) does the same thing but with a different, feature-poor browser-based interface. That non-networked 25% of your user base is likely to respond by either (a) demanding that you continue to support the Windows version; (b) switching to a competitor's Windows- or Mac- or Linux-based product; or (c) buying some networking, and joining the other 75% of the customers. Once that process has shaken down, you'll be left holding an expensive, tricky Slingshot-esque technology that has almost no users.

inklesspen 19y ago
"Buying some networking"? I admit I wasn't exactly clear with what the app does, but in the iPhone section I did say the app has to be used in places where there's no cell phone service, let alone wifi. It's an app used by public health agencies, who _have_ to be able to visit clients in their homes and chart their progress. And plenty of homes in the rural US have no dial-up internet, no broadband, no wi-fi, and no cell-phone coverage, and no sign of that changing soon. That said, I agree with you. The decision-maker at this company doesn't, and as I mentioned below, I've got little leverage to change things.