OnRails.org: Does a good idea make a good business?

Does a good idea make a good business?

Daniel Wanja — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:05:00 +0000

On top of our Ruby on Rails consulting work we would like to create a small internet “service” business. Something like time.onrails.org but more fleshed out and supporting paying customers. We are bringing on board Solomon White, which is an awesome Ruby on Rails developers, to help out. So the other day we met and threw out some ideas of project we would consider doing. I think we came with a bunch of great ideas that each on their own could support a nice business or at least would be fun to develop. Often the feeling is that sharing these ideas would give away the “magic” ingredients that would make the new venture a success, that competition would outrun us and they will be first and take the whole market. I don’t believe so. A very close friend created a spectacular Java/.Net integration framework. He is adamant about not revealing too much on how he created it or even that he created it. The result is that potential customers don’t “just” find him as they don’t know that a solution to their problem is out there, and he must convince them really hard that he has the solution, and sometimes that they have a problem. In other scenarios a ‘surprise’ announcement, like Apple masters so well, has certainly a great impact as that creates lot’s of buzz on the net and in the news. The reality is that we don’t have Apples audience and no one is expecting a ‘surprise’ from us. I don’t think that they are not many great ideas worth keeping secret Rather find a problem or need and make sure you create an awesome solution addressing it. While you create it, talk about it, spread the word, gather feedback, talk about the technical challenges you encounter, feel the interest that’s out there. Then deliver. And deliver something exceptional …sounds familiar? Well that concept is not invented here, but if we shine at taking one of “our” ideas, and providing an exceptional implementation I believe we can attract many users and create a nice business out of it.

So the steps in the process becomes something like this:

1. Investigate ideas (that's where we are at)
2. Choose idea.
3. Define project
4. Implement and spread the word.
6. Go live
7. Adapt and Improve

Currently we are in the “investigation” phase for several of these ideas. In other words we are coding and having fun and testing out different things. So here is the list of our killers ideas (in no specific order):

RailsLogVisualer plug-in: Realtime and aggregated log visualization of your Rails application. At the end of last year I wrote an offline Rails Log Visualizer. It’s pretty basic but provides some interesting information about the different applications we have in production. While writing it I realized that it would not be too difficult to have a plugin that would collect and aggregate request data and be able to provide information on the specific controllers and actions of the application. Of course it would require to support clusters of Rails applications. This plugin would provide a nice drill-down approach to the log data analysis which differs from a more traditional log analysis approach. For now, check out Geoffrey’s article on how to add Rails support to Mint for a nice way to analyze your log data on a deployed server.

ScrumPlan: An Agile Project management tool. I still do tons of enterprise work, and I really like how Scrum brings teams together. Scrum is very simple and a spreadsheet can be sufficient to get started, but I see the need for a simple dedicated tool to support the different activities that is simpler, more efficient and elegant than the existing tools out there. Lee is not too hot on this idea as we don’t use Scrum on our small projects.

FlexTester: An automation/regression tool for Flex. A large part of this testing tools would be in Flex, but the tool would have a server side part that is written in Ruby on Rails to keeps track of tests runs, to drive continuous integration and so forth. Flex is not directly related to Rails but I also do a lot of Flex work. I just think it’s a very nice way to create an UI, although in many case RJS does the trick as nicely and is “more” conventional. Flex is appropriate for enterprise applications (with many screens, many developers, lots’ of functionality) and Adobe just added some framework level way to record and playback user events (see the mx.automation package). There is currently one very expensive tool out there to create regression tests for Flex. Another more affordable one would be welcome. I started playing with the mx.automation framework and I am evaluating the effort implementing such a tool.

TimeOnRails 2: We have several hundred registered users (858 today) for time on rails and many use it on a daily basis. We received great feedback and also improvement requests. We use it our-selves on a daily basis and see many ways we want to improve and make it even more useful, especially on projects with multiple team members. Rather than just fixing the current code based which was implemented during the pre-RESTFull area, we want to rewrite it from the ground up. Note if we don’t select that idea, I will need to fix promptly several small issues on time.onrails.org.

RailsCloud: Rails hosting on a cloud. Ways to deploy or scale you Rails environment at the click of a button…This would leverage Amazon’s EC2.

S3Backup: Backup to S3 with a twist!

MySyder: The last year we worked in the eCommerce field. It’s pretty amazing what’s going on in this field, and there is the need to provide better tools for vendor and online stores. As part of “investigating” this idea we defined a subset of functionality related to “watching specific html pages” that we can turn into an online service or product by it’s self.

As you see we’ve got many ideas. I like Solomon’s way of looking at these ideas…”Which one we do first?” ... More on that in the future.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Daniel Wanja

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:33:35 +0000

@Madan. You can check out http://riatest.com/ or FlexBuilder 3 Professional has automation testing now backed in.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by mmreddyb@rediffmail.com

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:09:51 +0000

Hi,

From where can i download FlexTester.

Regards Madan

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Tigran Najaryan

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 13:40:43 +0000

If you are interested in GUI testing of Flex applications have a look at the upcoming RIATest testing tool at http://riatest.com

This is gonna be much cheaper than QTP :-)

Disclosure: I am the guy who is developing the product.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Daniel Wanja

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:27:18 +0000

Hi Jules,

I got several people asked me to release that work but as I wasn’t sure what I would do with it and the fact that’s it’s just a “proof of concept” and not very pretty code, I didn’t feel I should release it at that time. However, maybe I will open it up, see if someone understand what that code is doing and take it to the next level. Now, every Flex component has a peer class that implements the IAutomationObject interface. It’s my understanding that these classes come with the standard Flex SDK and don’t need FDS. However there is an AutomationManager that allows to record and replay events issued by the components which requires FDS. So my approach was to implement such a manager, I called it FlexAutomationManager, and it shouldn’t require FDS. All this needs to be verified. So the FlexAutomationManager just associates the AutomationImplementation for each component that is created and listens and records the events. These events can then be replayed. I just add them to an Array and replay them from the Array. The FlexAutomationManager implements IAutomationManage and IAutomationObjectHelper. You should look up these two interfaces in the Flex Help. Send me your email address at daniel [at] onrails.org. I’ll contact you off-list.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Jules

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 04:31:59 +0000

Hi Daniel, thanks for your reply. Would you be interested in releasing your preliminary work into the public domain? I find myself with a bit of spare time and feel that such a tool could benefit those of us in the community who can’t afford QTP :-)

Do you know if FDS is needed to have access to the Flex automation classes?

Feel free to email me off-list if you like.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Daniel Wanja

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:57:22 +0000

I think the Flex automation framework is quite nice. The drawback right now is that you need to buy Mercury QuickTest Professional to be able to write UI regression test. This is a little different that unit testing and a QA team could use it run through an application automatically where it would be pretty labor intensive for larger application if no tools are used. For developers it could also be useful, just to replay events while developing. The funny part is that most of the work was done as part of the Flex framework and QuickTest Professional just adds a little functionality. I wrote a small event recorder and playback class that works for most components. I doesn’t take care of text selection and drag and drop but it was promising. So one of the idea was to create a lower cost version of a tool similar to QuickTest Pro. But we decided to move on with Myspyder, so I haven’t spend more time on playing with Flex automation…yet.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Jules

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:43:21 +0000

Hi Daniel, I’d taken a look at the Flex automation packages in the past but they seemed to be quite limited (only support a subset of components, developers need to be aware they are writing testable applications) as opposed to something like Watir or Selenium that are powerful but unintrusive. But, I’m not sure I got the right impression. Did you follow up this idea any further? I’d be interested to know if you thought the same things as me?

You are a prolific writer!

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Daniel Wanja

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:06:02 +0000

Hi Pascal.

Your first sentence sumarize exactly my thoughts and is what I was trying to express in this article :-) Regarding the crowded areas I just saw today that aws-console.com implemented on of our ideas and their application looks promizing. For the log visualization many tools are generic and I think there is room for some visualization that is more appropriate for a Ruby on Rails application and present a definitve edge. Regarding “getting traction” that is the area we have to learn the most, although we acquired quite some experience with ecommerce sites, there is always way more to learn. Note we currently working on one of the “ideas” an making nice progress. So stay tuned.

"Does a good idea make a good business?" by Pascal

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:02:07 +0000

Interesting set of ideas. I like most of them and it will really boil down to 3 things: execution, execution, and execution (assuming the initial idea is sound).

My main worry for some of your ideas is that some are in pretty crowded areas (backup, hosting, log visualization), and unless you have a solid edge, it may be tough to get traction.