Re: Code donations for RPGUI initiative

Hi Nathan,

When I am mentioning pricing I am just throwing out average numbers that I
would guess a framework might cost - not trying to label any one forsale
framework.

Regarding your point about needing a free toolkit for a "few modern looking

screens", you don't need a stateless runtime for that. CGIDEV2, PowerExt,
and even RPGUI in it's current state would work fine.

True, but all of those frameworks mentioned are over complicated on a number
of fronts (including RPGUI in it's current state). At the top of the list
is the lack of "get me started quickly" documentation that explains how
things work well and the approach a developer should take to develop
applications using the framework. CGIDEV2, IMO, has quite the unorganized
set of source members and PowerExt suffers a similar issue - once again,
documentation could address this. One of my ways of addressing this is the
articles I am writing for RPGUI that are being published in
IBMSystemsMag.com. I am more or less documenting the storyline of RPGUI
from start to finish so people can have two benefits: 1) understand what
RPGUI does, 2) understand one approach to creating something for the
community. The latter is just as important as the former because I want to
encourage others to get their code into something like sourceforge.net.

The other complication with all of those frameworks EXCEPT RPGUI is that
they aren't fully open source. CGIDEV2 can't have code easily committed to
it by other parties that I know of, so it will only ever stagnate by being
under the power of a single person (though I appreciate all the work he has
done). PowerExt hasn't taken the time to put the code into a repository
(i.e. SVN or CVS) even though it is hosted on a GoogleCode site and so the
same issue applies there.

I am not saying RPGUI is anything to write home about, because really it
isn't much more significant than other efforts, YET. But I am laying the
foundation so it stands a much better chance at "making it big". I even
hope that this will create a sort of "competition" between frameworks so
others can "borrow code" to make theirs better. The rest of the web
framework world operates this way, and since there are multiple players
involved in the RPG+Web framwork world, there's no reason we can't do the
same :-)

Have I convinced you to donate anything yet? :-)

Aaron Bartell


On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Aaron Bartell
I need a solid framework that I can just give away when involved with
customers that need a few modern looking screens and I don't want to
go through the motions of trying to sell them on a $10k framework.

Hi Aaron,

I should clear up one misconception suggested in your last message. We
don't have a $10K framework. Actually, we don't charge anything for our
framework. We don't track the number of developers using it. We don't
charge for developer seats. We don't track the number of applications
created by developers. A few of our partners have deployed hundreds of new
applications under it. So toolkit price is not a barrier for any of our
partners.

The thing that we do track is the number of concurrently active sessions
that end users are running, and charge an annual fee accordingly. Our
session fee ranges from $20 down to $3 per year, depending on the quantity
licensed. The majority of our customers are small organizations that pay
$200 annually for a block 10 sessions.

I should stipulate that we are not in business to supply developers with
tools. But we occasionally have opportunities to partner with in-house
developers and independent contractors to develop new systems which provides
a setting for everyone involved to use our toolkit, if interested.

Regarding your point about needing a free toolkit for a "few modern looking
screens", you don't need a stateless runtime for that. CGIDEV2, PowerExt,
and even RPGUI in it's current state would work fine.

Nathan.




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