http://norman.walsh.name/2009/03/24/backToBlogging 12 6 2009-03-24T09:36:06-04:00 Norman Walsh 2009 Norman Walsh The epitome of pointless posts with a few notes on rapid appication development. Several folks at XML Prague, which was excellent by the way, asked me about my recent dry spell on these pages. It has not been the result of any conscious decision not to post or to post less, I've just been too busy. I started a project in late October that had to be in production in February. I wasn't the only one working on it, but I did a lot of the coding. It was a challenge. The application is large and fairly complicated. The front end is HTML+CSS+JavaScript, with the expected AJAX goodness. The back end: the business logic, user and resource management, auditing, responding to AJAX requests, everything that makes the application tick, is implemented in XQuery running on MarkLogic Server. (With a tiny little dash of XML Calabash for content ingestion, whee!) Project goals are never static and we made several fairly significant course changes in the three or four months (depending how you estimate the downtime for the Christmas-season holidays) of development. There may be other development frameworks that could have succeeded, but I'm now thoroughly convinced that MarkLogic Server+XQuery on the back end and standard web client technologies on the front end is a killer application development stack. If you'd like to learn more about rapid and agile application development with this stack, I urge you to attend our user conference in May. I believe the application I described above is going to be discussed and demonstrated in one of the sessions.