According the site, John Reel is a “Renegade Super-Programmer”. I can’t confirm or deny that or any of the other claims on their site. What I do know is that he and his partner demo’d at the recent DemoCampGuelph3.

They demo’d an application they’d written to handle the installation of a php, server based web application that they sell. Nothing too exciting except for one key difference. They claim to have sold over 1500 copies of that software in less than a week. That’s a lot of different environments to install on.

If you’ve ever installed a php, web app then you know you typically ftp a zip to the server. Unzip/tar the files in a location. Play with permissions, add a database, set more permissions, etc, etc. The good apps have useful config pages which clearly explain to you at any stage in the process what’s wrong and what you can do to remedy the situation.

What John did was much cooler. They took it all out of your hands. Of course that requires you provide them with some serious credentials and full access to your server, however, you have the option of doing it all yourself if you prefer.

How could you possibly test and support the infinite number of server configurations out there? You don’t. In their case they tested 50 setups. Then they staffed a team of 7 developers around the clock to monitor client installations. When a client ran into issues, those developers fixed the issue for them. They then used the lessons gained to make the software better.

I like it because it’s a non-technical solution to a technical problem. Software companies can easily lose site of the available non-techie solutions available to them.

If you missed DemoCampGuelph3, sign up for the google group and join us next time.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.