Frank Carver's Punch Barrel

One strand of my continuing research is about the design of productised yet customisable web applications. It seems that most corporate web applications are developed as customer-specific projects, which in turn leads both to a very low level of reuse, and to expensive projects with little or no economies of scale.

I’m guessing that one way to cut through this is to build an application in two parts: a core platform providing generic data and services, together with a set of plugins, themes/skins and widgets. Several very successful web applications (such as the WordPress blog I am using to write this) use this model.

- Creating flexible user applications using widget technologies