A Web Application Development Tool for People Low on Geek Factor?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Iceberg is a relatively new service which says it can make a professional web application building, a breeze. If it does what it says it will do, this is an amazing software development product. The company is based in Dublin, in Ireland.
The Good News
Almost too good to be true – it promises to make programmers out of us all, by enabling us to not just build web sites, (there are lots of point and click tools for those already), but to build web applications.
If you are a small business, you can use the tool for free, for up to 5 users assuming you have the right software and hardware platforms available.
There is a hosted version (I could not find any obvious reference to it on the website FAQ, but the co-founder Wayne Byrne said in a blog comment that it existed – so where is it Wayne???!) which eliminates the need for a platform of your own, but costs $10 per month per user. So not much good for that new social marketing killer app you’ve been designing for the last few months. But it would be OK for a small number of users in your company.
The Bad News
Well, it’s bad news for me.
Iceberg runs on Microsoft Windows server with SQL Server and is itself an ASP.NET application. Iceberg supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The cost per user is too high even for the hosted version. If you have the skills to code a large application using PHP say, and any associated framework, for large numbers of users, you’d be better off doing it that way.
As a long time software engineer, programmer and web developer I do wonder how accurate these claims can really be.
All my experience of productivity tools is that you substitute having to learn to code for having to learn the tool. And when you think you’ve done that, you realise you ‘ve also learned how to work around all the things the tool does badly. Then a whole support industry is created on the back of the tool’s idiosyncrasies.
The people running Iceberg say their offering is something else altogether.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Tools, Web 2.0, Web Design. 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.
