What is an Integrated Personal Development Environment (IPDE)?

An Integrated Personal Development Environment (IPDE) is any software application that supports End-User Development (EUD), or what some are referring to as a Situational Application. The goal of an IPDE is to enable end-users to create their own solutions.  One example is software that help users (usually children) to create their own video games.  Another example is Microsoft Access.  While their are certainly software development professionals that use Access, a large portion of the user base is hobbiests that need a simplified tool for visually creating business applications.  The most popular IPDE is the spreadsheet.  Microsoft Excel, is rightfully considered a IPDE because it can be programmed to perform a sequence of instructions (usually numeric calculations).  In fact, most modern spreadsheet applications offer an integrated programming language to help bridge the gap between it and professional IDEs.  If you need some convincing that a spreadsheet is can be used as a development platform, do a search on Excel Pac-Man.

Jonathan Sapir has coined the term "Situational Application" in his book, Power in the Cloud: Building Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos, to describe an emerging technology that gives users the capability to pursue their own solutions. The Power in the Clouds Website does an excellent job at explaining the key characteristics of Situational Applications;

1. They are "good enough" - no time is wasted on trying to make it pretty or scalable or high performance, etc.
2. They are developed and deployed quickly. All these things are built into the platform and you can build and deploy immediately.
3. They address a very specific problem or group of people. There is no attempt to try generalize the solution. It screams "I built this for me and only me". Of course, when you build software this way, it is much faster to do.

ZxApp IT is unique in that it is designed exclusively for individual productivity, and not as part of a corporate direction or plan.  This means there is no "cloud computing" involved.  ZxApp IT does not try to dumb down software development to the point where it becomes a toy, or some highly specialized tool that is only good for one purpose.

Screencasts

Common programming tasks that can be done with ZxApp IT: