Just a little Cooqy

My philosophy with Cooqy has always been to deliver functionality as quickly as possible. This usually means that software updates are streamed into production throughout the day, even as users are on the system. OpenLaszlo has the ability to compile code changes on the fly, which makes production software updates a snap. At times, I have even had to turn on the OpenLaszlo debugger in production to isolate issues hand-in-hand with end users. If needed, Cooqy has a built-in system alert message system that delivers messages from the sys admin to end users in near real time, via a popup message that end users receive in Cooqy. This is used to notify online users that a system [Tomcat] reboot is imminent, which are needed to activate servlet changes.

The race to deliver meaningful functionality has resulted in relatively few compromises. Usually I circle around and fix earlier shortcuts within a few days/weeks. Yet one in particular lingers to this day: Cooqy’s main website.

Cooqy’s main website is currently an OpenLaszlo-generated Flash app, but it has no business being so. Nobody in their right mind (quite correctly) uses Flash for an entire website. Although visitors with a broadband connection are unlikely to notice or care, visitors with dial-up are likely to bounce right off the main website and never bother to try Cooqy. There is a loading progress bar w/ text that describes the benefits of Cooqy to dial-up users, but even with that I expect that many don’t bother to wait for the main website to load.

Dial-up users are an important target market for Cooqy, b/c they can surf eBay auctions up to 10x faster with Cooqy as compared to eBay’s website. Yet I’ve created a roadblock to them with the Flash main website.

Have I lost my mind? Maybe, but not entirely.

The main website is only 250 lines of OpenLaszlo code, written in a couple of hours. At the time, this saved me days and days of work designing a typical HTML website, without having to worry about cross-browser compatibility issues. I plead guilty to programmer laziness in this case.

My strategy thus far has been to wait for the OpenLaszlo Legals release that would magically allow me to generate a DHTML runtime for the website from essentially the same code. (It remains to be seen how modem-friendly the generated DHTML runtime will be, though.) I was hoping that by this time Legals would be far enough along, but alas it looks like I won’t be able to try the conversion until next spring.

In the meantime, Cooqy is only being marketed via bloggers, word-of-mouth, and PR that generally targets techno-geeks…meaning that at the current time I expect most of Cooqy’s visitors are using broadband, probably from work. This is seemingly confirmed b/c Cooqy’s traffic drops off on weekends.

I will post more later about the importance of dial-up users, especially as it relates to Web 2.0 companies in general.