This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Serving the Long Tail: Developers of Usages
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss
Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Sam Ruby remembered that he really liked Nathaniel's talk at RubyConf about the long-tail. A quote from the talk: “Tickets to the interior were suddenly cheap enough for everyone” alludes to the historical fact that as the railroad system in America grew, more and more citizens were able to seek fortunes or simply settle down on the western frontier, away from the big cities.
I won't rehash the metaphor here, since others have done so already. What caught my attention most about Sam's post is that he nailed one of my recurring ideas:
...people who
aren’t currently developers won’t suddenly want to
become ones even if the cost were essentially zero. IMHO, the
answer is that you will see a lot more applications like that
financial application that was written in Excel.
That financial application mentioned is a spreadsheet passed around by members of Nathaniel's food cooperative to track purchases. Of course! Custom software for the long tail has existed in the form of Excel spreadsheets and FrontPage websites since before the long-tail was named. Will Ruby on Rails make an impact on that community of non-programmer programmers? No. Not in its current form. However, it might be getting close. Sam's vision is remarkably similar to what Michael and I are planning to do with the JohnHenry project.
I envision something like Rails on Rails (meta-rails?). A
web interface for defining your models.
(phpmyadmin shows it can
be done). A web interface for defining forms and reports
(a.k.a. views). And finally, web interface for people to
enter short formulas (a.k.a. controllers).
I'll add that I think a meta-rails solution for these "homesteaders" mostly makes sense as a hosted solution. They won't wrestle with software installs, finding plugins, and editing configuration files. They need a blank slate (or choice of templates), ready to go so that all they need to do is fill in the data and formulas and push a deploy button.
The OOPSLA presentation that triggered Sam to write his post is a must read. It proposes that we think of users as developers of usages. Brilliant! Seems like some of the ideas I discuss in my own take on the subject are gathering steam.
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