Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Hello again. I am back to share with you some of my plans for the future of Irie Tools.

The future of Irie Tools is all about focus, focus, and focus. Instead of producing a general purpose Pascal programming environment (i.e. Irie Pascal), Irie Tools will focus on web development (both web sites and web development tools). The web development tools are expected to include:

• An open source XHTML engine that will make it easy to generate XHTML pages using any programming language (I think there are ‘better’ ways to do this than ASP.NET and JSP).
• The next major release of Irie Pascal (i.e. version 3.0) which will be enhanced and integrated with the XHTML engine to make it easy to create web sites.

The plan is that the web development tools will support web development on Windows only (at least initially). However the hosting platform (i.e. the platform you would use to host the web sites) will be the Apache web server, running on Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux (Red Hat, other distributions will be added later).

Why did I make the decision to focus? Well, I have been reading alot of business books recently (about product strategy and branding), and they all seem to agree that it is a good thing for a business (especially a small business) to find an area of specialization and focus there.

Why focus on web development? Web development has the advantages of being an important (and growing more important every day) area of software development, but still relatively new (with room for new players and new ways of doing things).

P.S. Of course when the next major release of Irie Pascal becomes available special upgrade prices will be offered to existing customers.

Hi, my name is Stuart King, and this blog is my attempt to ‘talk’ with two main groups of people:

1. Persons using or interested in using products from Irie Tools.
2. Small business owners (particularly those in the software development business).

This is my first post to this blog so here is a brief introduction to myself and Irie Tools. I am a Jamaican software developer and businessman (experienced software developer and not so experienced businessman). I founded Irie Tools in 1998, got somewhat serious about the business in 2002 (registered the business name), and then finally got really serious (quit my day job) in early 2007 and I am now fully focused on Irie Tools. At the time of this post, Irie Tools has one product, a Pascal based software development solution (IDE with compiler, editor, and run-time engine). You can find more information about Irie Tools here.

What is this blog going to be about? I am planning to cover the following topics (I have no doubt this list will change):

• News about Irie Tools.
• My experiences running a software development business in Jamaica.
• The Jamaican business and technology scene.

What is this blog not going to be about? Well, hopefully I will be able to avoid the following:

• Trying to sell you anything.
• Boring you with personal problems and/or issues.
• Trying to convert you to my world view.