The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Mike Gunderloy of Larkware blogged about our MS Access to MySQL migration here. Mike is well known in the Microsoft community, although he has another blog, A Fresh Cup, that he bills as "notes from a recovering Microsoft addict," where he waxes eloquent on Ajax applications, Ruby on Rails and all things Enterprise 2.0.

The interesting point is that although there is a great deal of enthusiasm around Web 2.0 tools like Ruby on Rails, there are no Web 2.0 equivalents of the trusty drag-n-drop client/server tools like MS Access and PowerBuilder.

Face it, if you have to learn about Rails concepts like meta-programming and scafollding just to build a Web 2.0 app, your average VB developer is just going to continue taking a pass on this whole web thing and hope that it blows over.

Until there are Web 2.0 tools that provide a natural evolution from client/server development to web development, an entire generation of programmers will continue to hang fire. At a minimum, this will require drag and drop web development tools that don't require an entire bookshelf of manuals to get started building useful apps.

Labels: access, powerbuilder, ruby on rails