The key to speeding up development lies in two areas, careful planning (yes, I know we all hate this part, but do it well and when you come to coding the app, it is little more than a typing exercise) and building your own libraries, and in particular Classes.
During development of any app, even for your own use, keep your eyes open for anything that could be reusable, then wrap it in a class and make this a part of your library.
Lets take an example,
You are writing a database app that takes it's data from a file location on your site, then displays it to the user in a table.
This is begging for several Classes,
Class DataBaseControl - Made nonspecific so that it can handle all of your databases, with just a file location being needed. From there you add
- Collect headers (columns) for the SQL statement that you passed to it
- Colect column types
- Collect data
Now every project that contains a DB has a head start.
Dealing with the file location can be a class of it's own, depending on the string, it may be a local file or ftp or html, But one class to work it out and handle it all.
Then the view, which is going to be clearly many classes,
Cell, Row, Column, text scaling and others.
All are made ready to plug into any app that needs it.
In my UNIX days the key to all development was "All functions must be tested with both good and bad data and must behave well with both. The bad data might mean 'Stop execution", but it must be your own code that calls a stop and not the operating system.
In the same way as you build your own libraries, test all with good and bad data, and ensure they behave properly. B4A helps this with the ty-catch, but you can reduce the number of these simply by checking the data is of the right sort and in the range acceptable to this function call.
