Enterprise IT departments have tightened their belts in the United States and Europe. In Latin America, however, strict budgetary adherence has been taken to the extreme — resulting in the widespread adoption of open source software and an expectation that developers will train themselves by taking advantage of the documentation, tutorials, seminars and community forums that are available to support users of open source software. So when the Medical College of Tarijas in Bolivia needed a fast, secure and cost effective way to rapidly develop and deploy a significant and new web application, the College turned to the vibrant, local open source community of independent system integrators and developers.
Argentine by birth, Manuel Rodriguez Coria is an information architect in Tarijas. His company, Mavirroco Consulting, delivers projects ranging from content management systems and database design to quality assurance testing in industries from Telecommunications to Education. He is familiar with PHP, Java Server Pages, JavaScript, Oracle, Microsoft Access, MySQL, PostgreSQL and DHTML while his tool box includes Netbeans and Eclipse, among others. Manuel knew that if he could win this contract, he would have an opportunity to bid for numerous other projects across the University. However, the competition was deep and there was no room in the budget to purchase proprietary products. Manuel decided that this application should be built with a reliable Ajax framework such as Dojo, with the understanding that he would not be able to learn the ins and outs of the Dojo toolkit or use Eclipse and still deliver the project in a timely manner. Manuel had originally considered using and had scoped out Visual Studio.net, Java Server Faces and Tersus to develop this application now called the ColMed Catalog. After reviewing the best available open source products and frameworks, Manuel won this project based on rapid development time and lower cost projections using WaveMaker's Studio. From Manuel's perspective, "Visual Ajax means less code. Open Source means easy integration."
The Medical College of Tarijas wanted to create a more collaborative environment to practice medicine. ColMed was designed to be both a web directory and content management system for doctors to securely share contact information, schedules, events and even collect payments. It needed to be standards based, secure and — most importantly — easily maintained. Mavirroco Consulting selected WaveMaker's Studio with the PostgreSQL database to develop a standards based application, using open source components, that will integrate with the medical school's existing security infrastructure. With WaveMaker's intuitive interface and built-in tutorial, Manuel was able to quickly navigate the development environment. He posted any questions on the community forum and received timely answers.
The primary benefit that Manuel gained from WaveMaker was the speed of development. On his first project using WaveMaker, Manuel was able to reduce total development time by a third in comparison to more complex tools he had used. He delivered a first generation application in just two weeks while still creating custom views and configurations for different users. According to Manuel, "WaveMaker significantly reduced the source code I would have had to write had I selected Netbeans or Microsoft Visual Studio .Net". For the ColMed application, Manuel said he wrote approximately 200 lines of code versus the 800 to 1000 lines of code that would have been required had Visual Studio .Net been used.
Even more so, the greatest savings that Manuel found is in the ongoing maintenance of the application. Because WaveMaker is a visual development environment, WaveMaker-generated applications have substantially less custom code to maintain. The source code that is generated by WaveMaker is clear, concise and easily understood by Java, JavaScript and Ajax developers. And because WaveMaker deploys the application as a Java WAR file onto an existing Apache Tomcat server, the application was easily integrated with the Medical College's existing role-based security system. "The less time you have to spend writing source code, the more time you have to sell additional projects," claims Manuel, "Visual development means less code and lower maintenance costs which means more money up front."
Having successfully delivered one project using WaveMaker Studio, Manuel is receiving additional inquiries from other professional organizations with similar technical challenges. Manuel plans to grow Mavirroco Consulting by evangelizing the benefits of visual Ajax development to more Latin American developers from this beautiful, Andean college town.
About Mavirroco Consulting
Mavirroco Consulting is located in Tarijas, Bolivia and can be found online at http://mavirroco.neositios.com/. Manuel Rodriguez Coria's new blog for Spanish language web application developers can be found at http://mavirroco-wavemaker.blogspot.com/
About WaveMaker Software
WaveMaker Software™, Inc. provides an easy-to-use, open source Web application development platform for aspiring Web developers. WaveMaker Studio is Web Fast and CIO Safe™, enabling developers to quickly create and deploy Web applications that adhere to the CIO's architecture, security and data policies. WaveMaker Software is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California and is funded by Allegis Capital, Sippl Investments, Hummer-Winblad and Worldview Technology Partners. For more information, please visit http://www.wavemaker.com/.
