“Using IntraWeb, we are in the process of developing new business opportunities. Separately, we have two things — big Windows programs in commercial use, and many web sites provided for clients and designed with mostly static pages. For the Windows programs, the customers express interest in IntraWeb application replacements, and for new and existing web sites there is the opportunity, using IntraWeb, to provide new, rich interactive content, including the Windows programs when converted to web applications.”
Alan E Christian, Director, Christian Software Engineering Co Ltd (UK)
Local Web Pages and Christian Software Engineering
A feature of the many web sites is clients are enabled to edit, add and remove web pages by secure means directly on their own web site, to instantly update content. Now working with local web pages, independent developers, Christian Software Engineering, previously for many years produced standalone Windows programs, and now with IntraWeb, realize their Windows application development skills can be used to produce web applications and web services, vital to meet expected customer demand and to generate new business.
Situation
Christian Software Engineering was interested to find two things — that the way we do programming is undergoing radical change, and that there is now declining demand for the desktop applications we have been doing. The situation is one of taking the opportunity at this stage to leverage our engineering skills and as quickly as possible prepare to provide for the big changes in programming happening now — the change from standalone applications to most applications being web enabled, fully utilizing and providing web services according to requirements, and able to be accessed by any mobile device with a browser, particularly by wireless networked laptops accessing the Internet.
Implementation
At the outset, with the release of Delphi 7, for customer demonstration purposes, we straightaway built an Intraweb version of a Windows program we had previously written for the customer. Using the earlier version of IntraWeb at that time there was some redesign to do, for example scroll boxes in Windows could not be done with IW regions that were not designed to scroll the contents. Also, there was lack of knowledge, for example, not knowing how to access a form’s data from another form by referencing it in the uses clause. We have learned from the IntraWeb manual, the IntraWeb training guide from Kazoo software, the latest version demos, the atozedsoftware news groups. And we are learning more by developing ourselves, IntraWeb demonstrations for customers. We now want to invest in IntraWeb and participate in the ongoing developments.
Impact
We have discovered the power of IntraWeb: IntraWeb is RAD for the web. We have found that IntraWeb is now powerful and reliable. We can now rapidly demonstrate to any customer many types of rich interactive content for their web sites and we now have the prospect of new business.
Technology
Development tools: IntraWeb, Delphi, Delphi scripting in ASP.NET
Present web site tools: Dreamweaver, PHP, MySQL