Line of business software development is one of the least discussed and least sexy areas of software development. Ironically, it is by almost any metric the largest. There are more HR applications that are succussfully running inside their organizations than there are indie apps that are successful business. Why don’t we care about LOB software? Why isn’t there an LOB blog or podcasts about being LOB developers (or even “dark matter developers”), the tools they use, and the struggles they face? Well, LOB development has been boring at least up until now.
2015 is going to be the year that all of those older LOB applications get brought into the modern world. This will be brought upong by a mixture of pressure to go mobile and the natural purchasing cycles of medium to large enterprises. On this week’s Coder Radio, Chris Fisher and I, had a lively discussion about Xamarin.Forms and my less than stellar expereince with it.
Purists will of course say that for the best expereince on a platform you have have to develop natively on the officially supported tools for that platform. I agree with that, but here’s the thing — not everyone wants or needs “the best”. We make compromises of this sort al the time. For instance, I can’t afford the best car, so I drive a car that’s good enough for me; if you must know, I drive an 08 Toyotal Corolla. You see, I made a cost / benefit analysis when purchasing my car all those years back and that’s the exact sort of calculus that business types make routinely when it comes to commissioning line of bussines applications; that might explain all the IE 6 and VB code that’s running around for sure….
Here’s where I get controversial — I think they are right and correct in their decision, at least in principle. The issue becomes one of balance. How do you balance quality and cost-savings? That’s the question (at least in the mobile space) that Xamarin and the various vendors of mobile web-based app development solutions will have to answer. I still hope that Xamarin gets their act together with Forms, since C# is a much more pleasant language to work in thatn Javascript, but only time will tell.
