Econometa

I recently attended a Rails meetup here in SF with David Hansson and some other folks in town for the AJAX Summit. I wanted to try to get more of a feel for Rails, AJAX, and the current Web 2.0 mentality (and look for potential hires). I took away two lessons: (1) these technologies really do make the Web into a more effective applications platform; and (2) frameworks like Rails are helping to reduce application development time and effort to a kind of tipping point with many ancillary effects.

To me, the second point is the really interesting one. Once application development is easy and fast enough, people can:

- Deploy a consumer Web application in their spare time
- Try out various features with instant feedback from real users
- Avoid taking on outside capital for such applications until an initial feature set and user base is established
- Free up time previously spent on gory implementation details for application design

In other words, an increasingly large base of foundational code (e.g. Rails, the LAMP environment, etc.) is no longer the primary economic focus. Instead it is a key enabler, open sourced and ready to be built upon by people who can then focus more on meta-code like the database and UI design, as well as the overall functionality and aesthetics of the app.

This last point about aesthetics extends from application functionality to the code itself. Aesthetically designed code that adheres to consistent principles is more usable and modifiable, and adds to the above effects. The new batch of Web apps tend to be amazingly clean and functional in both their appearance and their code. In my opinion, they have significantly raised the bar in terms of what we expect as either users or programmers, and will enjoy significant competitive advantages.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.