AppForge

» see appforge.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

AppForge came out of Ratio DesignLab, a shop formed in 1985 by a group of Georgia Tech students under Doug Armstrong. The company itself was formed in April 1999 to turn the work into a product, picked Palm OS as its first target in June 2000, and shipped the first public version at PalmSource that December. It sat in Atlanta and it sold one idea: write the application in the language you already knew, and let the tool worry about the handheld.

The language you already knew, in 2001, was Visual Basic. MobileVB dropped into Visual Basic 6 and later Crossfire dropped into Visual Studio .NET, and from one project you could produce something that ran on a Palm device or a Nokia running Series 60. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry followed. On the device side a runtime called the booster did the actual work, and the booster was licensed, which is the detail that matters more than any of the rest.

On 13 March 2007 AppForge ceased operations and was assigned for the benefit of creditors to Hays Financial Consulting, so the assets could go to bidding. The Atlanta Business Chronicle put the debt at 1.8 million dollars. Then the infrastructure came down on a schedule nobody outside the company had been told about, and every developer who had shipped a Crossfire application found out by trying to do their job.

Visual Basic 6 was the language I met in a university lab, the way most people in Turkey met it: not chosen, just there, on a machine you had booked for an hour. Palm handhelds were not. I never saw one in Ankara outside a magazine photograph, and the idea that you would pay for a plugin so your VB code could reach a device nobody around you owned belonged to a different market. The warning that came out of it, though, got read in every programming forum that spring, including the ones I was reading.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the activation bill ~

AppForge sold two flavors of license. The ISV version wanted a yearly renewal of the development environment. The non-ISV version wanted the client booster activated at deployment, on each device.

So when the validation servers switched off on 2 April 2007, ISV holders lost the ability to update their applications the moment their current year expired, and non-ISV holders lost the ability to install anything new at all. That second one had a cruel edge to it. A handheld that ran out of batteries and reset needed its booster reinstalled, and reinstalling meant activating, and activation meant a server that no longer existed. Working software on a working device could be killed by a flat battery. Tim Anderson, writing about it that month, called it the scenario that opponents of product activation had been describing for years, and told readers to demand escrow before buying anything activation-dependent from a vendor small enough to disappear.

~ the three weeks after ~

The sequence is worth reading as a sequence. Operations ceased on 13 March. The license validation servers went dark on 2 April. Eight days after that the developer forums and the online shop went offline, which removed the last place customers had been talking to each other. On 12 April appforge.com began redirecting to Oracle. On 18 April, Oracle confirmed why.

~ who took the pieces ~

Oracle had bought the intellectual property, and only that. Its statement left no room to hope: "Oracle did not acquire the AppForge...former customer contracts, so Oracle does not plan to sell or provide support for former AppForge products going forward." Several AppForge engineers were hired into Oracle's mobile work. The customers were not part of the transaction. Rival toolmakers smelled the stranded install base and moved on it within weeks, with Satellite Forms running a transition incentive and NSBasic publishing a porting guide.

Nineteen years later the redirect still works. Type appforge.com into a browser today and you land on Oracle's global support contact directory, which is the one page on the internet guaranteed to be unable to help you with AppForge.

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