I’ve been working with a business partner on a web project for several months that provides functionality that is quite similar to several existing sites but is vertically tailored to a new market.  So far, we’ve done a fair bit of work in Ruby on Rails to get a prototype going and while the development time has been faster than with other languages, it’s still slower than we want.  (To be fair, I should disclose that a big part of the slowness is the relative infrequency that we actually get together and work on this.)

I realized that we’re moving too slowly on this project so I turned to the open source community to see if there was a package that could help us to do at least an alpha launch and test the market waters.  Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be a good solution for us.  In looking, I did find several commercial applications that appeared to provide a complete application base for us which are customizable.  After researching the offerings, my partner and I have selected one of the applications and are moving forward with installing it and customizing it.  Suddenly we’ve gone from months of development time ahead of us to $500 out of pocket and a full blown application that we need to do some customization to and presto – we have a live application.  I love it!  Of course, we may run into limitations in the functionality of the application, and since it’s not open source, it will be harder to customize, but assuming there are no show-stoppers, we’re still far ahead of where we were.

This whole experience reiterates the importance of the lesson I learned fairly early in my career that a business should buy software (or use open source!) unless building a custom solution provides a competitive advantage that can’t be achieved with off-the-shelf software.  I love Ruby on Rails for rapid prototyping, but it is still custom software development and using an existing application can save a lot of time.  Hopefully my next post on this topic is to gush about the ease of installation and customization for the application…