My boss is asking me to implement certain features in a web application (rails) that are relevant for only a couple users, sometimes just one user (the reason is this is targeted for businesses and a user has a high life-time value for him).
This is not simply “show different content to different users” though, the web has become pretty good at handling that. It’s about actual functionality, like different form fields, ajax requests only for a single user etc..
While i can imagine ways to hack this up, all sorts of alarm bells go off: bloat and unmaintainability being the primary ones. Also, i can’t find any web applications doing this very much (at least with the custom functionality growing as a function of the number of users).
I couldn’t convince my boss yet that this is a bad idea, am i wrong here? I feel like a web app is not the right tool for this job. And if this is indeed a bad idea, what would the best way be for me to clearly explain him that?
Thanks!
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I couldn’t convince my boss yet that this is a bad idea, am i wrong
here? I feel like a web app is not the right tool for this job. And if
this is indeed a bad idea, what would the best way be for me to
clearly explain him that?
I am really not sure this is a bad idea. To me it sounds like a good idea because your customers will get what they want from you, not from someone with more agile processes.
It seems it’s time for you to think about some plugin system in your application architecture.
This will allow you to make custom feature development isolated as a plugin without bloating the whole thing.
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