Development….Explain yourself please!!
I wanted to write this post to explain what we have been doing in development and why. Hopefully, this will be informative and exciting for you, as we are very excited about our future and what our software can now become.
Our original intent behind the development of the software…
When the software was originally written, the intention was to create the most feature rich classified and auction applications in the market. Additionally, we wanted to leave the code open or unencrypted to allow for client side development. This ultimately would either provide, for our clients, a great piece of software “out of the box” or a large jump forward to achieving the functionality desired. At that time, php was relatively in its infancy along with the tools associated with php development therefore limiting the scope of the software. This has drastically changed over the last few years forcing us to change as well. While the intentions of the development are the same, we soon were left with a choice to make with respect to the code architecture and its extensibility. So now what??
Today’s intent behind the development of the software…
When faced with this decision, we chose to devote the last half of this year rewriting the software. This re-factoring has taken place in the ClassAuctions code set. As mentioned previously, due to the lack of tools available, infancy of our company, and the platforms we were using, we created the software editions (Enterprise, Premier, Basic, and Lite) as independent code sets. At the time, it was thought that this was the only way to offer different product levels while still offering an available source code set. This is no longer necessary. So, we are re-factoring the code at the ClassAuctions Enterprise level and going to re-create the remaining products and editions from this single code set while adding a new licensing system that will control it all.
You may be saying now “Sounds great for you but what does that do for me as an end user?”. Well, it is going to offer many advantages. The biggest advantage to you is going to be a dramatic increase in development efficiency. We will be able to rapidly improve the code and add new features as one edit will improve all products and editions. Additionally, with respect to improving the organization of the code, you will see advantages like, performance, modularization, security, separation of display and function, etc… External developers will be able to more easily extend our software to meet needs that aren’t met in the “out of the box” feature set. Our intention in the future is to continue with this development so to ultimately and continually offer a product that is superior at every level.
What about a timeframe???
We have recently released what we hope to be our final beta release of the ClassAuctions Enterprise software. This being true, we will release 3.0.0 RC1 following the successful evaluation of the current beta release. Soon after this, we will release a 3.0.0 RC1 version for all software. Once the release is complete for all products we will be off to the races as we have a fairly large development team chomping at the bit to apply their creative skills to the code. It is going to be good times and I am so excited for next year.
Thanks as always
Brian Warburton
Operations Manager
www.geodesicsolutions.com