Tired Of Traditional Technical SW Development? Try This Instead.

In the mid 90ies of the previous century time became ripe for developing PC-based software even for challenging quantitative problems in all kind of technical fields.  Many efforts were put to become virtuosos in C+, C#, ... to transforming complex models and algorithms into LAN-enabled systems.
But there are much better ways now to build your special application universes.

• Act 1 - Set up the foundation - apply the methods and programming languages that fit for your purpose. If you need sophisticated numerical schemes you might choose C++, C#, ... 
• Act 2 - Integrate your foundation into Mathematica - in many technical fields your objects can be described in the language of Mathematics and manipulated and operated mathematically. Your foundation will extend Mathematica into the universe of your domain.
• Act 3 - Set a distributed computing environment to work. Facing the multi-core and multi-thread revolution (like CUDA ) you multiply performance by a clever mix of symbolic coarse- and fine grain parallelization. gridMathematica supports scalable infrastructure.
• Act 4 - Set up application data base management - you often want to have technical data encapsulated.
• Act 5 - Build a web connection layer - webMathematica and web a services will help you to wrap your Mathematica and make it a Servelet web application. Build your adequate web interaction pattern.
• Act 6 - Tie everything together. Your server application (in the cloud?) - data base (local?) - web front-ends (including special "iPad", "iPhone", ... front-ends?).
• Act 7 - Make it scalable by license management and business modeling.

It might become your short story of being lucky.