ToolTwist Software Development Solution

The Twist

Tooltwist is the only development tool we are aware of that properly recognises the different roles and requirements of the software developer, and the software customiser. While the requirements of software developers are relatively clear, the conflicting need for customisation work is often overlooked:

• Most customisations need to be done by people without a software development background (i.e. they don't want to write Java code).
  
• The vendor would prefer not to give customisers access to source code.
  
• The vendor cannot support hundreds (or thousands) of customised versions of source code.
  
• If customers modify their own copy of the source code, there is a risk of introducing bugs, and support / upgrades become difficult / impossible.
  
• It must be possible to install and remove customisations from the production application in a controlled manner.
  
• It should be possible to introduce customisations from multiple sources, allowing 3rd party add-ins to the original product.
  

We are not aware of any web development technologies that take these important factors into account. However, without addressing these issues, any commercial web- based solution will be either:

a) restricted to fixed, "take it or leave it", functionality (which is unlikely to be broadly accepted by the business community), or

b) result in multiple versions of the software, progressively increasing maintenence effort as the number of customers increase, increasing difficulty to introduce upgrades, and lengthening software release cycles.

ToolTwist provides answers to these traditional software distribution problems, and allows a drastically different sales model. ToolTwist based applications have the option of being shipped as a web appliance - like shipping DVD players. Customers create modifications using the ToolTwist customisation tools, and once tested, load these onto the appliance using the provided tools. They look after their customisations, and the vendor looks after the core product. The ToolTwist technology ensures that the two remain separated, but allows the customisations to inherit from, rather than rewrite, the base product.

We are finding that this sales and deployment model is well accepted by customers. Furthermore, we find that it's possible to increase the number of customers without increasing the size of the development team. We have proved the technology and approach, and regularly perform upgrades at customer sites without customisation work needing to be repeated. However, customers find they can still perform extensive customisations and apply them to the base product easily.