The pitfalls of productivity  What are the trade-offs of rapid
development tools?  Religion and folklore have plenty of
cautionary tales of taking the appealing, short-term option, and
not thinking about the future. I worry about this when I make
bold claims about the speed of creating solutions in Metrici. I
need to be more open about the trade-offs.  There is nothing
magical about reducing development time. The methods Metrici
uses are much the same as those used in other tools (though I
like to think we have crammed more into a single platform). But
each time saving method has a trade-off.  Delivering solutions
as software-as-a-service (SaaS) means there is no infrastructure
to buy and configure, no software to install, and common
features like user management and security are already in place.
SaaS is simpler and cheaper for most solutions. The trade-off is
that you have to entrust your data to someone else.  Automation
of database and user interface (UI) makes developing a solution
as simple as describin