The Long Tail of Web Apps
My colleague Kiran Dandekar has been doing something I've been doing lately: working with Ruby on Rails applications in the same way others work with PowerPoint, Visio, or Rational Rose. There's often a need to "sketch out" a web service, build some "wireframes" or "workflow diagrams" as a means to think through architectural and other issues, and also as a way to socialize the idea across the team. There are any number of tools available to facilitate this process, but Ruby on Rails is unique in its approach to sketching out a web application: build the web app itself.
I'll spare you the sermon on Rails; if you've tried it out, you don't need any convincing from me (and if you have been bitten by the Rails bug you aren't wasting time reading my blog, you're building web apps). If you're not familiar with Ruby on Rails, I'll just say this: Rails makes building basic, solid, functional web apps easier and quicker than anything else I've ever seen. By a long shot.
Kiran called and pointed me at a URL for his "sketch". We'd talked about the application previously, but I'll confess I only partially understood what he was driving at at the time. After a few minutes of clicking around his Rails app, the lights quickly came on, and not only did I understand clearly the value proposition that was being presented, but also the points where things should be developed further, and areas that would be problematic.
At one point, I ran into a server error, leaving the demo stymied. Kiran hung up, and called me back a couple minutes later. "Fixed," he said. We walked through the rest of the demo, and I congratulated him. "Just something I cooked up over the weekend," he said.
Kiran's technically high-powered. He hasn't been a developer for some time, but I'm sure he was quite effective as a coder way back when. But coding is decidedly not part of his day to day responsibilities nowadays, which makes it surprising to see an application like the one he showed me pop up from his laptop over the course of a weekend. In the time it would have taken to forge the appropriate PowerPoint slides that described and hinted at the application Kiran was considering, he built a decent version of the real thing.
Maybe it's just me, but I think this has far reaching ramifications. I'm told that TurboGears for Python and a handful of other web development frameworks are out there now that offer similar power and speed to the web developer. Could be -- great as it is, I'm not one to suggest that Rails has magical qualities that separate it categorically from all other tools. Rather, I'm suggesting the opposite: Web Development has reached the point where the "long tail" of web apps has become a reality. Or will very soon.
Kiran's example highlights the utility of Rails development as prototyping aid. But the same power that makes it effective as a weekend project for Kiran makes it plausible for a wide variety of other "long tail" scenarios to become reality. I'm toying with the idea of writing a set of small Rails apps for managing things around the home. "Block and tackle" apps -- apps that provide basic UIs for shared databases spring up spontaneously from a handful of hackers collaborating at a conference. Consultants really do show up at a client's office with their PowerBooks and leave at the end of a day with a working app that captures a good part of what the client is seeking. And it's not a demo; it's for real.
The marginal cost (and effort) for building new web apps has dropped dramatically in the past two years. While much of the buzz and hype in the infosphere has orbited around AJAX and great advances it has catalyzed in high-end web apps, there's been a revolution at the other other end of the scale as well. For every Google Maps or Yahoo! Mail, there are a hundred or a thousand humble but effective web apps sprouting up, serving increasingly specialized and esoteric needs in the marketplace.
