Open letter to the Servoy development team

[ApeWare]

I recently was introduced to Servoy and was able to make it out to the training in Phoenix. Before going to Phoenix I spent around 3+ hours talking with Bob C. about the features of Servoy; it sounded too good to be true. I have had a lot of experience with software that promises to cure cancer and solve world peace just to find out that it has problems even launching. For this reason, I was excited but suspicious. Could it be possible that someone actually thought out a piece of software and developed it FOR developers? IMPOSSIBLE!!!

So I went to the class and spoke with those who had some experience as well as spent some of my own time playing with the software. I could not find a single person who had anything bad to say about it, nor could I find any problems myself.

After the first day of training I went to my hotel room and after a quick call to Bob C to figure out how to make the connection to my mySQL database I had developed a simple page to allow me to administer my users and activate and inactivate their accounts. This whole process (including the call to Bob C.) took 10 minutes! It would have taken me 3x that long (or longer) to do it in PHP.

A couple days later I sat down with David W. and we (mostly he) replicated 30%+ of the functionality of our query engine (which was done in FileMaker and took approx 2 weeks to build) in just over 2 hours!!!

So I guess what I am saying is thank you for building such a fantastic product! Servoy is one of the most flexible RAD platforms I have experienced. It is well thought out and allows me to build powerful front ends with virtually no M-^Swork-aroundsM-^T. After seeing this product I quickly became jaded with FileMaker (AKA: Work Around Pro) and was actually angry that for all these years they have been forcing me to jump through hoops to provide even the most simple interface enhancements. I have worked with FileMaker since v2 and we are now on v7 and there have been no significant interface enhancements in the last 4 revisions. I am so happy that I now have a tool that allows me to be creative and give my users the experience and speed they need.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for your creativity and talent in creating such a powerful piece of software that, for my situation, is exactly what I was looking for. Please keep up the great work and please keep listening to your development community.

Your hard work is greatly appreciated!