Back in 2000 I was hired by Report2Web, a small company in Raleigh, to be their Java guy. They had just been purchased by Redwood Software and were ready to port their ActiveX report viewer to a Swing applet and XML. I completed that task, through several design changes, and learned a lot, but I moved on before they started developing a JSP version.

A couple of years ago, I was developing a web interface for an ERP (DBA Manufacturing / Evo-ERP) software package and I decided to market it. The whole project reminded me of my Report2Web experience, so the name DBA2Web came naturally to mind. It was also dual-branded as Evo2Web. Not having access to the ERP software vendor’s customer list, I chose to partner with them for the marketing. There was a slight conflict, since their customers might buy my product in order to avoid buying more licensed seats of theirs, so we decided to raise the price and to close the code. If I had it to do again I would open source the code and offer my annual maintenance agreements and upgrade subscriptions, but hindsight is 20/20, eh?

The web site was created to support marketing, offer trial downloads, and handled support requests. I copied the look-and-feel of the app over to the web site. I made bite-sized videos that prospects could look at to get an idea how various features worked. It was a great exercise and helped me to gain feedback that I used to improve the program. It used a lot of jQuery the first time around and my vision was a bit too limited. Users want me to push the boundaries. That means developing a number of new features. At the same time there will be a total rewrite of the front end using ExtJS.

Now I just have to figure out how to take it open source…