There are basically three ways to build a house. One is completely custom. This costs the most and unless you have very experienced architects and construction people, the results won't be that good. Another is partly-custom. Several different plans with various options. A third is called pre-fab. That's basically building houses in a factory.

Most software is completely custom. There are few real architects in software and the industry changes too frequently for there to be any architectural standards. Some software is partly-custom. They use products called frameworks. These provide major features, like heating, air-conditioning, bedrooms, bathrooms etc. There have been some attempts at pre-fab software. This involves automated code generators, but the results are generally suited to certain kinds of systems. Worse, they only generate systems based on the same flawed concepts used in the non-generated systems.

There is another possibility. Build software like a hotel. Provide some common services, like a foundation and an elevator system. Each room provides all other services. That makes it possible to quickly provide housing for anywhere from 5 to 5000 people. Hotels also have rules for joining rooms together, allowing for larger groups to stay together. You can still make specialty-service rooms, but try to avoid that.

In order to build software like a hotel, we start with a foundation. Most often that is Visual FoxPro and Visual MaxFrame Professional. We invented a single form that provides common services as well as some uncommon ones. The common services are add, edit, delete, search, save, cancel, more and duplicate. Each form has rules allowing them to combine with other forms. This results in unique, uncommon, yet highly-desirable features such as add-on-the-fly, edit-on-the-fly, delete-on-the-fly, search-on-the-fly, picklist, multi-select and parent-child. These same features are possible in desktop and web-based applications.

This whole approach is our trade secret. In fact, other programmers have started to move in this direction, but continue to fall short.