Micro-Apps are the Future

The future of web development will involve the development of micro-apps, rather than “monolithic” apps. This is a very good thing for business customers of smart web development companies, as it will decrease complexity, and therefore cost.

A few drivers that we have observed:

GitHub

GitHub makes it very easy for developers who don’t know each other, but have common problems to solve, to collaborate without communication (very low friction).

Ruby on Rails

Rails makes it possible to develop web apps w/ web services rapidly.

Cloud Computing

Companies like Heroku, Slicehost, Amazon EC2 are make it easier & easier to deploy & scale your infrastructure without needing hardware experts.

SaaS

Software as a Service has become mainstream & acceptable, and it’s easy with tools like Spreedly or RailsKits to allow customers to buy without any sales involvement. Because Rails apps commonly have both web UI + web service APIs, these can be used as standalone apps or components of bigger apps.

If you build each component of your system in a decoupled way, you have built something that could potentially be developed out as a standalone project that could be either released as open source (and get developers around the world to debug/improve/expand it) or release it as a SaaS subscription product.

The Catch

The catch is that very few web developers are so close to the edge of this. If you’re starting from scratch, or aren’t afraid of the big rewrite, be sure to choose a partner that is using a lightweight dynamic language like Ruby or Python, and that uses open-source software behind the project. Any other choice, and you’re wasting your money.