Mission Critical Applications on the Internet

It's long been thought that Internet based applications have been the exclusive domain of larger companies.  This perception is well founded when you consider the requirements (costs) to host, support and maintain a web presence that interacts with your customers, vendors or the public at large.

This perception has been turned on it's head as a result of the slow, steady acceptance of "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) programming platforms.  While there is still plenty of room for traditional, high cost Internet development projects, the cost of having your own customized Internet business application has been radically reduced with PaaS.

It wouldn't be unusual that an application developed with PaaS would cost 10% of the cost using the traditional (Java and other high level development languages) methods.  Some of this results from the fact that, in the typical PaaS development platform, much of the complex work of maintaining the infrastructure (servers, databases, etc.) is integrated directly into the programming platform itself.  Other savings are caused by the steamlining of the development process and the use of prototyping tools to dramatically shorten the development lifecycle.

There are many PaaS vendors, Intuit & Salesforce.com come to mind.  But the system that has impressed me the most is PerfectForms.  PerfectForms is simple to use, but very powerful when needed.  Because it's a subscription service you can use it only for the number of users and for the length of time required.  Please click here for a deeper review of PerfectForms.