Good Enough is Great!

dbFront excels in quickly and economically, bringing web applications to life.  Applications built in dbFront start life with a powerful and solid set of default functionality.  The primary trade-off is that dbFront lacks the ability for super-deep customization.  As a result, systems created using dbFront quickly get you to the point of "Great!" with the hope that this is good enough.

Below we will look at the categories of web applications for which dbFront is uniquely suited.

The Impractical

One of the specific voids that dbFront attempts to fill is to enable applications that would otherwise never be built.  Examples are:

• the applications for which there is insufficient ROI,
• the applications for which there is inadequate budget,
• the applications that are needed now and not later.

Most businesses are willing to spend a day on an idea that looks promising.  Anything beyond that requires serious budgeting considerations.  All of the above application categories are ideal candidates for dbFront because with dbFront it can take 30 minutes or less to stand up a web application based on an existing database.  This makes it feasible for a DBA or Analyst to:

• have a conversation with a client,
• cobble together an initial ERD,
• build a database and finally,
• show the client a working application using dbFront before the day is over.  

Even better, because dbFront builds its UI dynamically, there is every opportunity to continue building on the initial database structure iteratively.

Because the licensing, capital costs and development time with dbFront are so low, systems that would have been considered impractical are now possible.

Even if dbFront is not the final tool, little is lost because all of the analysis and design can be carried forward into your ultimate solution.  In this case, dbFront would have served the purpose of a uniquely functional prototyping tool.

The Changeable

Lots of effort is spent creating web applications that can respond reasonably to anticipated business changes.  This is because changing applications in midstream is risky and expensive.

We designed dbFront to make many common changes trivial.  Creating, changing, or removing fields.  Adding new relationships and moving fields around.  dbFront takes all of these changes and more, in stride. It also does its best to reuse any preferences you might have previously saved.

The Unknown

Sometimes you have no idea what the final solution should look like, but you know that you have data you want to collect or maintain.

In those cases, start with what you know and add the rest as you gain a better idea of what you need to do.

dbFront will do its best to stay out of the way and allow you to change things as needed.