A facinating aspect of software development is its altruistic nature. An enormous wealth has truly befallen to some individuals in the industry due to proprietary safeguarding. But I also can’t think of an industry where it’s common practice to publish one’s creative work under a license that permits anyone to use it as they please – just don’t try to sue the author for any mishaps.

aisDataBrowser is developed with arguably the most sophisticated tools around – or at least the most expensive. I can’t imagine how much money Microsoft has poured into .Net, but I would be surprised if anyone had spent more money on a single software library.

Add to the pile what’s been spent on Oracle’s E1 over its 20+ year lifespan and the sum of money that has taken to make aisDataBrowser a possibility must be quite staggering!

But the might of Microsoft and Oracle is not quite enough. Without a couple of open-source libraries, putting this together would have been a lot harder – if not impossible.

Pidgin

The smarts behind converting the query logic into an AIS request is written using a parsing library developed by Benjamin Hodgson.

MaterialDesignXaml & DragaBlz

It’s quite remarkable that despite all the effort behind .Net, that an out-of-the-box app still looks like an early 90’s Windows application. Reminds one of the days when the mouse was quite a novelty!
James Willock saw that this is unacceptable when users are experiencing snazzy interfaces on their phones and tablets so he brought Google’s Material to Xaml.
aisDataBrowser also use DragaBlz, another one of his creation that gives the application tear-able tabs.

This dichotomy of software development is now quite the norm. On one hand you have the billion dollar giants like Microsoft and Oracle and on the other you have individual like Hodgson and Willock quietly tapping away.