An innovative software business needs to ensure that at its heart lies innovative technologies.
The past few years have spawned many technologies all of which have been paraded as the ‘next
way forward’ for software development – many, perhaps unsurprisingly, have fallen by the
wayside. We believe that the right technologies for building great software applications should
be those that are proven in business – if it is right for a multi-million pound solution to be
built using a particular technology then we believe it is right for us to recommend it to our
clients.
But with such choice available, what do we choose and what do we discard? We are predominately
a Microsoft oriented software development company and therefore it should come as no surprise
that we promote Microsoft technologies! But that doesn’t mean that we only use their products,
there are situations where the competition offer more appropriate alternatives. Let’s take a
look at what we use and why...
This has really been our main database server of choice since day one. Microsoft have continually pushed
the product further forward on each version and with versions now available for mobile devices, single
servers and clustered servers it provides us with real scope when it comes to development. Virtually every
one of our projects uses data storage somewhere in the design and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 allows us to
rapidly build the solution knowing that the client’s data is going to be protected.
We are strong believers in this product and as Microsoft continues to develop it we know that our clients
are going to continue to benefit. This year SQL Server 2008 is being released and it looks as if this is
going to bring even more advancements, many of which we are going to be able to add into our software
designs.
.NET is really the cornerstone of great software development for last few years and whatever your view on
Microsoft’s products, .NET is really superlative. The very fact that you can use one development technology
with multiple programming languages provides us with really unique opportunities. Where once we would have
had to employ teams of developers all with different programming language skills we can now have smaller
teams using whatever language they wish, safe in the knowledge the code that is produced will be ‘same’.
But it is not only the cross-language support of .NET that provides us with advantages, it is the
cross-platform support that is a real winner. We can develop applications for Windows, the web, the Intranet
and mobile devices – all from one development tool! A quick look at the list of businesses that use .NET
only furthers our belief that we are using the right technology.
More and more clients are asking for web based applications today and that means we need to not only be able to develop them, we need to be able to deploy them. Microsoft IIS has grown up over the years from a simple web server to a fully customisable application server; with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) we have been able to write code that actually controls the server and configures it how the client wants. This has been particularly useful where our applications need detailed configuration work before they can be started or where the client wants to roll the solution out to many servers with ease. We expect IIS to become even more integrated in our applications over the next few months as we push forward with more detailed development projects based around this hugely successful product.
It’s not all Microsoft! Indeed we have been very impressed over the last few months with Adobe Flex and are
working on new projects this year based around this excellent development technology. Microsoft have been
quick to respond to Adobe’s Flex with the introduction of Silverlight, however we felt the Adobe product
had the edge in terms of its maturity and trust amongst end users. It provides us with incredible
development opportunities and the chance to push forward with software that is a substantial step above
the competition.
Flex is not only easy to work with (most of the time!) it overcomes one of the huge challenges that we
have faced in the past with trying to meet client’s expectations. What the client would like has sometimes
been impossible to achieve with conventional ‘web based’ technologies such as AJAX, with Flex we can
actually exceed them! We have previously used Flex 2.0 for development work, but with our aim to always
keep on top of the latest releases we are now starting new projects with Flex 3.0. This year will probably
see a big move from conventional web based applications to those with a strong Flex input.
