I have been following CUBA for the last one month or so and i have to say that i have been very much impressed with the platform and more so with the prompt response on the forum from the CUBA Team. Keep it up.
I have a few questions, based on what i see in the Licenses and Pricing page on your web site.
By when can we expect the platform to be available with Apache 2,.0 license.
It is mentioned that few components will continue to remain commercial.
Is integration with mobile devices in the future road map - Apache Cordova etc.
By when can we expect an update on the above, i remember reading in some post that it would be by end of March 2016, but i am wondering if there was a more concrete date set.
I do have a comment on this:
Although I appreciate the fact that the license is moving towards an Apache license, I have a serious concern about it. I do hope you still offer CUBA as a commercial product. Though the open source movement has produced many products, it is also true that many other are abandoned. I woud personally prefer to pay for the product and have you stay in business than see the platform dwindle into oblivion.
Hi Armando!
This is a very valid concern and we have been considering the change seriously. What we realized after the first half year on the market is that we have a very competitive product and great feedback, but the growth of community stumbled upon two things:
-runtime license limitations - e.g. the current model is not appealing for those who want to build a product and sell to multiple customers
-lack of a totally free version which could attract enthusiast developers who do not have the budget
Strong community is key to product success, so these needed to be addressed.
The new model resolves these issues. There will still be an (optional) commercial part, but with a much more transparent ‘per developer’ license. Plus we will be offering trainings and commercial support. This revenue should ensure the product can develop, and we have some great stuff in the roadmap for this year.
I hope this will give you more confidence in CUBA Platform future!
Hi Andrey,
It souds fine. I will add a suggestion though. I have just finished the tutorial and built my first CUBA application.
Of course my next step will be to browse through the help and try building more complex applications. At this point I feel both engaged and empowered by the tool. So engaged I would actually pay to get additional trainning.
If there was a book available I would certainly buy it ( in a paralel situation I bought 3 books on Lightswitch to improve my skills, and got frustrated with XAF due to the lack of trainning material and the complexity of some menial tasks ) .
If there was a subscription service to get additional training I would go for it.
Of course, building trainning material is time consuming and divests resources from your core tasks : creating a superb development tool, but it also helps get the community engaged and could become an important source of revenue.
It might be worth the time polling among users if they would be willing to subscribe to a trainning service and how much they would be willing to pay ( so you get a free tool but you pay for trainning) or how much would they pay for a complete book on CUBA.
Hi Armando,
We are starting to provide trainings since mid April. The training will be in the form of online webinars (7, two hour each) and each group will have no more than 5 participants, so it will be quite a thorough and engaging course. We are already building up our first group, so if you would like to join - drop us a line at info@cuba-platform.com!
As for the book - that’s definitely a good idea, and we’ve been considering it. However there are no certain plans yet. Currently we are mainly focused on improving documentation and samples. Your feedback on the completeness of the documentation will be very welcome.
I have gone through the development section of Cuba’s help. I feel the “Development Recipes” should include more topics ( some of which are covered in the forum right now):
Attaching files ( single and multiple )
Cascade lookups ( I posted about this on the forum and got an answer, but this is so common it should be in the help)
Creating field and object validations
Creating multiple views for an entity ( I am not sure this can be done; the mechanic browser screen in the tutorial ends looking a bit weird for lookup purposes after the chart is added in page 97 )
How to do bulk data processing ( e.g. flagging all the invoices which have partial payments(payments would be another related entity) and are more than 30 days old).
How to change the look & feel of the application.
Those are my 5 cents regarding the documentation.
As a nice and simple addition to the platform would be to have IntelliJ snippets for the most common tasks this would be particularly usefull for xml because it is a rather verbose notation language.