GeekLimit

Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 1

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

The concept of Rapid Prototyping in manufacturing is fairly simple: get an idea and bang it out to see if it fits your application.

In the same sense, for someone as myself who has to be a jack of many trades (NetAdmin, TechSupport, WebDesign, HelpDesk, etc.), I don’t have a lot of time to develop anything substantial as far as web applications are concerned. The bad part, though, is that I see an enormous potential for web applications at my organization.

Some of this potential I see comes from the fact that I’m always looking to bring the best tools to the job, and enjoy using communications tools to utilize my organization’s strong points. I also end up finding great tools while searching for others. Even if you don’t have a need for a web application or multiple applications in your organization, just the process of seeing what’s out there may just get the wheels turning to something that is really out of this world!

In the next few postings, I will be commenting as I build an Extranet/Intranet system for my organization. Here will be the requirements for this project, possibly subject to review as I go along. I recommend these criteria for anyone interested in rapid web development:

• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be as close as possible to the organization’s current business model. Additional tools that fit the organization’s business model, but are not currently used, are encouraged
• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be at a usability level equal to the least-qualified of its users
• All software/web applicaions used in the development of the project must be either Open Source, in an established Open Format or 100% free to anyone who would like to use it. This includes everything from the Operating System on the server to database management to web content services to FTP tools, etc. This is done to keep material costs as low as possible.
• All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must support Single Sign-On (SSO)
• The maximum development time on this project will be no more than 2 weeks (10 business days) and for no more than 60 minutes per day (a maximum of 600 minutes, or 10 hours total development time). The Extranet/Intranet project must be in the production environment with the users trained on how to use it at the end of the time limit. (With the $30/hour I usually charge people for web development on my own time, this puts the entire solution cost at $450 + material costs)

Seems a little crazy now that I look at it. Oh, and one final thing: I’m going to be doing this for real. I manage a small school district with 3 campuses on a WAN. This will be a production-grade Extranet/Intranet for an educational environment. Unfortunately for me, the rules listed above were for a corporate Extranet/Intranet, but that just covers my office staff. I’ll have to account for teachers, parents and students.

Might run out of time before I can customize anything. Let’s find out…

Comments (0) | January 26th, 2006