Refresh – Lessons on how not to develop a Web App
At this months Refresh a talk was given by Rumble Labs on the trails and tribulations of developing their fourth coming web app, ‘Onotate’.
Developing a Web App from scratch is a difficult and time intensive thing to do. For my final year Major Project I will be developing my first ever Web App. When I heard Rumble Labs were taking this months Refresh. I took the opportunity to learn from the pros.
Onotate is a web app devoted to presenting design concepts to a client, allowing them to annotate and approve them. While there are various web apps that take in the same ground as Onotate, Rumble Labs felt they all had substantial shortcomings and decided to design their own. What started off as a side-project quickly turned into a full time occupation.
Onotate is Rumble Labs first web app. Previously their bread and butter came from client led web design. They now have got a taste for Web App development and plan to pursue it further in future.
Their problems began when they decided to use Drupal as basis for the backend of the app, presuming that it would cut development time. This turned out not to be the case. To get Drupal to do what they wanted a lot of hacking had to take place. This led to poorly optimised code which was fraught with bugs.
The inadequacies of Drupal they were forced Rumble Labs to start from scratch. Once they utilised the Yii fremework, development sped up. The problem was they had to take on more client work to help sustain development of their web app. The result is it has taken them seven months longer than they had previously anticipated.
Onotate is currently in invite only Beta stage. They hope to properly launch some point next month.