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When we designed the engine behind RedG, we decided
to change the rules in our business.
Your website is much more than an "electronic personna". You should
consider it as a tool with which to build your business. This
single step you take now can determine your technological future to a
large degree. We want to tell you why we think your investment with us
will take you further than any other competitor.
When we built this system, RedG took a very significant
technological step forward in this industry by providing an Open
Source
platform into the Real Estate marketplace. This brings huge financial
and logistical benefits to our customers, and has enabled us to
literally leapfrog our competitors, both financially and
functionally. As an added bonus, Open Source security has
proven robust enough for military and governmental users, and even Apple Computer.
RedG now provides the most technically sophisticated
and widely used development and production software environment in the real
estate business. Whether you are looking for a template package or a fully customized
real estate data management platform, RedG's Open
Source technology provides you outstanding value and performance in areas our
competitors have not even considered.
This page was written by the RedG software team, and describes the development
process from their perspective. We asked the team leaders to write about their
experience in developing the RedG system, and to
tell you what, in their minds, made this project their very best ever.
And we asked them to keep the geek-speak to a minimum.
On System Design:
Many months of background research went into this system design. We
examined every conceivable competing vendor product separately, and
tested the market leaders in fine detail. We examined their form fit
and function closely, and created a matrix of functionality. We
conducted a user survey and "look and feel" tests, and even brought an
industrial psychologist aboard to ensure "human factors" were right.
We then created a "super-set" of options, combining all of the functionality of the other systems.
This set of features, functions, and products formed the RedG
base design. This design has evolved significantly as we've implemented the
architecture, as described below.
Our mission was clear: Best the competition, come what may.
Tall orders for anyone, but we've always focused on providing
significantly more value to customers at significantly less cost, and
that is the one financial
paradigm that works. Always has, and always will.
The RedG design team had a once-in-a-career
opportunity to:
- Create a software architecture with clear requirements from scratch.
- Deploy the most sophisticated and widely available technology with unlimited resources or scope.
For us, this was a wonderful chance to really "do it right". We had
been developing real estate software within the existing legacy
software frameworks, and so it was a thrill to start fresh, and we took
full advantage of the opportunity we were given to design this system.
It took us almost a year all considered, and that's a long time in
system design, as those in the business know.
For a web environment I knew I wanted to embrace the Open Source Business Model. (Open Source is a huge grassroots movement
of software developers building superior software without chanrging license fees)
For those of you new to Open Source, this is the web environment that
really facilitates the Internet as we know it today. It is the largest
technical community in the world, and there are virtually unlimited
resources of both developers and source code available.
Our Software Development Manager writes:
I’ve been in this business over twenty years; and in my experience, there are two factors that make or
break every software project:
- Access to a stable software code base upon which you can build functionality.
- Available personnel.
As a result, most software projects are initiated with 3-5 developers, and then quickly spin out of size,
control and cost as features are added and software is maintained. We’ve seen that time and again with the "big"
players. We knew with Open Source we could head that off, and what really happened is that we had the chance to
technically leapfrog our competition by at least three generations of code.
That’s a lot by any measure, but the long-term beauty is that we can leverage the entire Open Source community.
One of the largest sites, SourceForge currently has over 400,000 users, and over 40,000 current projects; it is
growing by more than 1,000 projects per week! These are all freely available programs that we can get at no cost.
That’s what I’m really excited about for our customers.
On Project Management:
I’ve spent my career juggling customer requirements with developer schedules, release cycle logistics, and budgets.
I had heard about Open Source but never had a chance to use it professionally until I came to RedG.
In the end result, this has allowed us to yield huge benefits, and I suppose the true measure of success is
that is our business has grown by multiples, while the rest of our friends in the e-commerce industry are vastly
underemployed.
There are very real financial and logistical reasons why Open Source works for us and our customers, and some
interesting discussions on those benefits can be found here and here.
The result is that I can get quality software code written by sources from around the world bidding for work on
exchanges like eLance. This provides our customers with virtually infinite options at absolute minimum cost. Because
the code is Open Source, anyone can work on the system. Our customers don’t just buy a "shrink-wrap" software
package, they buy a system that can be supported by the bulk of the networked technical community.
From OpenSource.org: "The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute,
and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people
fix bugs."
This allows me, as a project manager, to marshal virtually infinite resources for my customers on-demand. This is a
huge bonus for our customers. They don’t have to make a big investment up front. RedG, and the entire Open Source
community, have already made that investment. Our customers can use that software and build upon it over time as
necessary and according to their budget and schedule.
That, by the way, is the Rosetta Stone of project management, and it's why RedG’s Open Source initiative works so
well for me in my role. The technology allows me to provide our customers systems with virtually unlimited
migration and growth. The Open Source community is now opening up new worlds for the real estate industry too.
On Software Development:
We knew before we started that we were really developing a Content Management System (CMS).
We spent a lot of time investigating many of the leading packages on the market today. As the link above
points out, there are a few large CMS packages for $100K+. While we could have made that investment, the problem is
that there are so few users of such software, there is only support from one vendor, and he’s busy trying to
sell more software, not ensure our success.
When we began considering our options in a web environment, we ranked them by Costs, Complexities and
Compromises (we call them the Big Three C’s).
The Open Source products we reviewed were better than any we could find commercially. They were not only
technically superior, but they were the right price: free, and they were supported by thousands of developers
around the world.
That led us to Zope and Python, which in my view is the richest, most
sophisticated and most widely supported web development platform in the
history of computing, and truly a software engineer’s dream
environment.
Open Source is supported by millions of users, many of them students or foreign developers. The free market
economy of Open Source yielded Unix, Linux and is truly the reason that the Internet is even possible today.
Most developers know that; ask your "geek" friends, I’m sure they’ll agree.
It was the best technical decision I’ve ever made, and we are thrilled with the sophistication,
scaleability, maintainability, and ease of implementation of this system. From a developers perspective
this is the best possible toolkit, because it allows me access to all the source code of the total environment,
and that just isn’t available anywhere commercially. From a managers perspective, I can bring the most talented
people you’ve never met onboard for a fraction of traditional resources, and I get work done in half the time
and from infinitely more sources.
On Documentation:
My job is usually to bug the hell out of software weenies until they
scrawl some cryptic notes to shut me up, and I usually spend my time
making up documentation and revising when everyone redlines it. A most
frustrating position for an English major, but what’s a girl to do?
With developers in three countries, we needed a new way of supporting
this project, rather than the "hurry up and wait" documentation
mentality that pervades our industry, or at least in every company I’ve
ever worked for…
(Editor’s note: Our documentation department grows and shrinks with the
winds of project change, and our Team Leader usually begs borrows and
steals resources to meet project requirements. She’s really good at
that, and for some reason resents that they didn’t teach her how in
college.)
In Open Source there are a myriad of ways to document a project, and we
chose a documentation system called Zwiki. It’s really great because it
is totally web based, and my developers use it as part of their coding,
working across oceans and odd times. It’s a great way to document a
project, and for the first time ever, the completed documentation was
released the day that the code shipped to test. This allows our
customers to participate directly in the development process from
requirements through cut-over. Our customers love the interaction, and it makes for a better product every time.
On Test Engineering:
One great result of the decision to use Zope is that it acts as a
secure and stand-alone or distributed web server. That allows anybody
to run a stand-alone complete system on their desktop, or remotely on
our production servers under UNIX. This made my job much simpler, and
more enjoyable, because for first time in my career, I was able to
equip the software developers with the full toolkit they need to test
and debug their code, on their desks, and as an integral part of the
process.
This is so very important, and customers don’t often know how much
energy and time should go into a proper test environment of any web
project. For me, that’s been the biggest difference I’ve been able to
make, and it feels good to know we’re shipping solid production code
without the traditional problems of the old-time test and release
cycles.
We’re now able to provide stand alone complete solutions that
internetwork seamlessly. The same code that runs on a desktop can run
on a remote enterprise server. Seamlessly. And that has never happened
with any web environment I’ve worked in before.
Working on this project was the most fun I’ve had since... well, ever, I guess. Let's do that again! What’s next?
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