Web-App Development Made Simple
3:23 PM EDT Tue. May. 15, 2001
From the May 15, 2001 issue of VARBusiness
The company's hosted development environment is unique because it places the entire development and deployment infrastructure for a customer's Web application on Westside's site. Westside calls this a hosted rapid application development environment.
A developer directs a Web browser to http://www.westside.com to access the GUI developer application, called Westside Designer, a sophisticated Web application used to build other Web apps. Westside's development environment takes advantage of the fact that Web applications are becoming more standardized. On the server side, nearly all Web applications are based on the interaction of a Web server, an application server, and a database. Westside Designer hides the details of the database, Web server, and application server, letting developers use Web forms, JavaScript, and HTML to create applications. The development GUI makes it fairly straightforward to accomplish SQL tasks such as handling query definitions, schema design, and data relationships.
Westside also effectively leverages Web-browser standards to create a rich, interactive developer environment using only style sheets, JavaScript, and HTML. Westside Designer is browser-based and requires the style-sheet support in either Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 6 to work properly.
The downside of this dependency on style-sheet support is that applications created using Westside Designer also require style-sheet support. Though any browser at the Internet Explorer 4, Netscape 4.7, or America Online 5.0 level or later can correctly access applications that were built using Westside Designer, this still leaves older browsers, as well as many alternative devices, unable to access those applications.
Developers will need to understand the basics of how databases work, and they'll need to have a good working knowledge of JavaScript and HTML code.
Developers who want a custom look to their finished application also will need to understand how to manipulate style sheets. Westside's custom server-side JavaScript implementation, called Westside Script, includes special objects used for manipulating some of the features of the Westside site and also has a few syntactic oddities, such as case insensitivity.
Westside's Web site runs on Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server, Internet Information Server Web server, and SQL Server database, though the development environment is independent of Microsoft technologies. A version that runs under Linux using the Apache Web server will be available in about three months.
For $9.95 a month, up to five developers can create multiple applications. The price includes 25 Mbytes of storage and 500 Mbits per month of network throughput. The price includes data recovery via nightly backups, as well as technical support using E-mail. Support options such as guaranteed response times to tech-support questions, uptime guarantees, and telephone support also are available.
At this point, Westside has few competitors. Database-centric approaches exist, such as Intuit Inc.'s QuickBase and Bitlocker Inc.'s DataBase Plus, as do Web-site design approaches such as Trellix Corp.'s Web Express, but no one has integrated full Web application development and deployment like Westside. One possible future contender is the open-source Zope application server, though it's focused more on content publishing than on general-purpose Web application design.
Westside plans to offer a shrink-wrapped version of Web Designer later this year for customers that want to host their own rapid development environment, but for the moment, its hosted solution is about as simple an environment as a developer could hope for.
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