SQLFusion blogs

After Office Live it is Google's turn to offer a web site creation technology.

We anticipated the democratization of web site creation tools a couple of years ago and we invented a nice technology, called the Page Builder.

It is the first Ajax web site builder around.

It is currently sold to web hosting companies as a Do It Your Self web site solution under the Drag and Drop Site Creator brand. http://www.dragdropsitecreator.com/

Page Builder is already 70% open source. We are improving our documentation and preparing a full open source release very soon.

So please stay tuned...

We now have a lot of experience in site creation technology and I am waiting for my Beta access to Google Page Creator to see what they have and give you my 2 cts on it.

I do not see Google Page Creator or Office Live as a threat for our site creator, we are open source and we support / package / license to any web host or community builder who wants to offer site building features to their users.

This is definitely exciting.

A software solution developed by SQLFusion, the first AJAX based online site building software, branded "Drag drop Site Builder" offered to web hosting companies is getting media coverage in the WHIR (Web Host Industry Review), the Web hosting's premiere daily news provider, a reference for the web hosting industry.

Here is a excerpt of the article:

"SQLFusion's product, Drag Drop Site Creator (dragdropsitecreator.com), uses PHP and Ajax technology to display page and database components in a Web browser for creation and modification." (click here for the full article)

I was reading a few articles lately which gave me some inspiration for this post. They all come to a conclusion which seems to be pure common sense, but which is way more difficult to apply than we might think.

Whatever we create a software, a painting, a book,etc. this is aimed at one thing: satisfy somebody else. With that said, the best would be to listen the person who will enjoy our product and try to match all this person says she wants to read, see or do.

But if you are the creator and you try to bring novelty, most of the time you first need to come up with something and only after that can you ask "how can I improve my work?". Where it is feasible for a book - that's why writers love their editors don't they ;) - and eventually possible for a painter - see how many versions of a painting exists behind "chefs d'oeuvre" when you look at it with X-rays - the task looks much more difficult with a software. See for instance this excerpt of Marc Benioff interview by Phil Wainewright of ZDnet:

"Once we had the API really working well, then customers really started to hammer me on customization. They would say, 'Why can't I change this tab name, why can't I change this field name, I want to be able to do this, and I want to be able to that.' Well, [we would say] the problem is that the tab name is through the whole documentation. It's in the singular, it's in the plural. It's not just in one language, it's in twelve. And then customers would say, 'Yeah. So what?'

Indeed, "yeah, so what". People who use our software are king and always right. This is what we found out while developing Drag drop site creator, and now Open Source Fusion. We might have some good guesses while developing our software at first, but most of the improvements we bring are results of our customers and software user feedback. We make a rule not only to listen to them but implement systematically their suggestions. And the most exciting is that it works. Ultimately all the hard work spent listening to advises, suggestions and feedback of any kind pays off. Support costs go down, customer satisfaction goes up and you build up the quality of your software.

In conclusion, because this process is at the core of any Open Source project, I believe that Open Source has the key element for delivering higher quality software in the long run.

So who would dare to say that Open Source cannot bring the best quality software in those conditions? :)

I have spent 10 years following the open source and I am impressed by its ongoing evolution.

I remember that not long ago I had to wait quite while for KDE 1.0 to be released. Today I can hardly keep up with each new release of Ubuntu.

Open Source software was meant to be for developpers, geeks. Today open source software is synonymous with nice looking browsers, window based deskops and even enterprise applications.

In the last 6 months I have been working on Open Source Fusion project, where we select and make available open source applications for business.

In each web application category we want to offer and support at least 3 web applications. 2 years ago, when I searched for accounting, customer relationship management and accounting software I could hardly find any. Most applications in those categories were early projects, immature applications, not completely open source or unstable. Only a handful of applications were usable at the time.

Today, I cannot keep up with all the applications which are available. It is as if every day more application appears in the open source eco system than what I could track.

The growth rate is quite overwhelming. Open source software quality, size of the supporting community, usability and features are increasing at an amazing speed.

I am quite impressed. I have always thought it would happen one day, but who would not be impressed while facing a new "Cathedrale".

Indeed, today, I am seeing a "Cathedrale". The "Bazaard" is part of the past.

It is hard to understand how this can be possible. There are no more than 500,000 developers in the US today and the number didn't increase for the last 5 years. So where all this tremendous energy comes from?

I've seen something similar with blogs. The number of blogs has exploded in the past 3 years.

One of the answer could be - if put metaphorically - that there is an increasing "concentration of energies". Here is what I mean with this: the Internet has gathered and optimized the energy of millions of wanabe developers and journalists generating an unprecedented power of production. It is like those solar power plants that use milions of mirrors to reflect the sun light in one point to concentrate the energy offered by each ray.

Using this metaphor, a software developer contributing to an open source project, someone writing her blog and contributing content, a shopper writing a review on an e-commerce site or a business posting his products on e-bay: each of them is a ray of light. Altogether they form a tremendous creative power.

This result is a power of production never seen before.
We will see much more application, more diversity, the long tail of software will become a reality and the size and complexity of software is significantly increasing.

From the Bazaar will emerge Cathedrals of sizes never seen before.