Ephox LiveWorks!
In December we started a new initiative at Ephox called LiveWorks!. It's something that I'm very excited about because I think it has the potential to offer a tremendous amount of value to Ephox and, more importantly, to you!
As I mentioned in an earlier post Ephox follows an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology for our development which delivers us a great amount of value internally. Some of the benefits we get include:
- Test driven development has greatly improved product quality and code coverage
- Iterations ensure that we can deliver the most valuable features first
- We are becoming increasingly flexible with respect to changes in the market and how they reflect on the product roadmap.
- We can now release software at any time, at least internally.
The last couple of points have been of great value internally, but there's more to releasing a software product than just developing the software. When releasing some of the major things that need to be addressed are sales, marketing and support of a product. Obviously these are critical aspects of releasing any product, but they do increase the time between code completion and release. Thus, as clients, to date you may not have seen the results of our internal flexibility for roadmaps and release cycles.
LiveWorks! is about delivering this value to you. LiveWorks! will give you an insight into what we're working on at the moment and provide useful code, integrations and plugins we've developed previously that we can release more easily on LiveWorks!. All the integrations and plugins available on LiveWorks! come with source code and are free for you to download and use.
LiveWorks! is about hearing from you. We've provided a community mailing list as part of LiveWorks! that myself and many of the Ephox developers are on. If you see a project on LiveWorks! that interests you or you'd like to suggest an integration please let the LiveWorks! community know. If you'd like to share an integration or some code that you've found useful we'd also love to hear from you.
LiveWorks! is still evolving. Over time we will be adding more value to LiveWorks!. In the near future we hope to be releasing more prototype integrations and plugins. We're also hoping to provide you with a better view of what we're planning by providing development road maps, early access releases and weekly builds so you can monitor the progress of our products and be ready to take advantage of new features.