Agile Web Development
What is Agile Web Development?
Spending many months documenting requirements and design before starting coding is yesterday’s approach to software development. It fails to acknowledge fundamental characteristics of software. For example, many people start with a vague idea of what they want software to do. It is only when they start to use the software that more detailed requirements form in their minds.
One response to the inadequacy of the old waterfall method has been the emergence of the Agile approach in recent years. Iterative, incremental delivery involving close collaboration between software provider and customer is a key emphasis of the agile approach, which is well suited to development of dynamic web applications.
Ruby on Rails
When delivering web applications it is crucial to able to provide rapid feedback to customers in the form of working software. That’s why I prefer delivering dynamic web applications using the Ruby on Rails (RoR) web application framework. RoR is an open source web application framework based on the Ruby programming language. Open-sourced in mid-2004, RoR fosters rapid, agile development due in part to its philosophy of convention over configuration.
What do I offer?
I offer development of dynamic web applications. Put simply, these are often databases with a web front-end.
My approach is to regularly deliver features, starting with those that will give you, the customer, the most value. I can help you by transforming your concept into a deployed web application, guiding the evolution every step of the way.
My experience
In addition to my extensive experience of building web applications using Java EE, I have explored RoR since the day it was open-sourced and have built several RoR applications for business, personal and family use. In 2008 my client work has been almost exclusively Rails development. From 29 May to 1 June, 2008 I extended my knowledge of Rails by attending RailsConf in Portland, Oregon.
Of several talks I have given at the Sydney Rails Group the most recent was about What’s new in Rails 2.1 at the June 2008 meeting (slides here). In 2007, I addressed the question Why is Ruby such a good language for Rails? at the August 2007 meeting as well as presenting an introduction to Capistrano earlier in the year. In November 2007 I presented a paper entitled Why would a Java shop want to use Ruby? at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Brisbane (slides here).