Rapid Application Development
One of the themes in our talk ‘Supporting Learning Initiatives with WordPress’ is the idea of creating applications quickly, easily, and cheaply. On a practical level, we’ve found WordPress to be an effective tool for realizing these objectives. But to be really effective I think its useful to adopt the mindset of keeping development small, fast, iterative, and as close to the users as possible.
“Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, “ from 37Signals, is a terrific introduction to this style of application development. 37Signals has a stable of highly regarding web-based products, such as the project management, collaboration tool, Basecamp, so the philosophy preached in the book can be seen in their practice. And the focus of the book is on the process of creating a web 2.0-based consumer application. But taken in a more general sense the lessons are very transferable to a higher-ed environment where we face similar challenges to the commercial development world. These days a web site is an application, a wiki is an application, everything can be thought of as an application.
The book is freely available on-line, although I opted for the more traditional print-on-demand option — makes referring to it easy. And its a fast read — in fact I read it while waiting for Adobe CS3 to install (short book — long install process.) I highly recommend it.