[Commentary] Confessions of a Servoy 3.5 newbie

by David Workman
Data Mosaic

With the release of Servoy 3.5 last week, it is my belief that Servoy developers are faced with greater challenges than ever before. Which may seem like an odd statement considering all the new powerful features 3.5 gives us. All we have to do now to create a web application with AJAX, data binding, session management, and data notification is to throw some fields and objects on a form and click a button to launch the web browser. I can hear your thoughts now, how much simpler can it get?

Let me explain. I find the act of coding an application the easiest part of the overall process of creating an application. What I find most interesting/challenging/rewarding is envisioning a solution from a set of requirements. On the flip side, knowing what an application development platform can accomplish greatly influences just what requirements are brought to the table.

When Servoy was first released, I soon realized that what I could accomplish with Servoy was much greater than the tools I was currently working on at the time. Through an ongoing process of exploration, testing and discovery my perspective of what was a valid and an easily doable requirement expanded greatly.

And after four years of fairly intensive Servoy experimentation and experience, I was just starting to feel comfortable with what I could do with Servoy.

Well damn, that was yesterday. Today there is 3.5 and I feel like my ship just sank and I washed up on an unfamiliar shore. Where do I start? Which way do I go? What can I do in this strange new land? With this new unexplored territory I find now that my limiting factor to what I can do is my imagination and experience -- not what Servoy can or cannot do. And this is very uncomfortable feeling!

With that in mind, let me point you to an article that provided some much needed perspective, "Web 2.0: The power behind the hype":

Web 2.0 isn't a 'thing', but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results.

That's a lot of new concepts to absorb. All made possible by the rich interface medium that is available to anyone surfing the web. Now Servoy has made coding Web 2.0 applications A Very Simple Thing. This is like giving everyone a laser printer in 1986. We saw the results of that paradigm shift -- it took a tree's worth of paper for most people to realize that a laser printer didn't make one a designer.

Yesterday I was a Servoy developer, today I am a Web 2.0 developer. My brain has a lot of catching up to do.