TUNES development startup

[Al Williams]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:

>    I'm in contact with various people to found a startup company that
> would develop TUNES. Any advice, contact, funding, idea, etc, is welcome.

Wow! That's brilliant news. Congratulations!

> We're particularly trying to define
> 1) a business plan.
> 2) a development schedule.
> The idea would be to raise funds thanks to an early prototype,
> so that the path to such a prototype is important, and advice is sought.

Perhaps one of the areas TUNES has been weak in so far (IMHO) is
explaining the kinds of markets that would initially accept it. Fare's
original mention of a sample application, the media database (was it CDs
or vidoes? I remember not) is insufficient for this task; no "end user"
would feel a driving urge to install something as vague as a "reflective
programming system", yet it would not be doing TUNES justice to sell it as
a CD database!

I would say that you should target bespoke software developers, who are
highly technically competent, and are looking for a system that will help
them deliver reliable, efficient, powerful software systems on budget.

In that market, broad platform support is a definite plus, since they will
want to be able to produce software that can run on whatever cranky
hardware their client forces them to use.

Ease of installation and administration will also be plus points, since
they will want to be able to easily put a TUNES "runtime library" onto the
client's machine, followed by whatever files define their product in terms
of the core TUNES system. It'd be nice if these were just a "TUNES
runtime" binary, a "TUNES core library" file or directory, and then file
containing the application. PHP3 applications, for example, are a bitch to
configure, usually requiring customation of httpd.conf, php3.ini, and
fields in a per-application configuration file for base paths, base URLs,
administrator email addresses, SQL server login details, the creation of
said SQL database and its loading with initial data... ideally, a TUNES
application should be installable onto a blank system by putting a core
TUNES package in one directory, maybe setting up its base path in some
kind of "tunes.conf" file or registry key, and then dumping an easily
created "snapshot" of the application into another directory and creating
a script with the appropriate paths in it.

ABW

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