StillMoving Application Development

Fri, Jul 30, 2010

· Focus · Powered By · Experience · Clients · Extranet

Leverage For Your Projects: When you set out to develop a web-based solution to your business challenges you can take advantage of existing code. Why re-invent the wheel every time you want to build a new model of car?
Feeling Trapped By Software Vendors?: Commercial software is not your only choice. Their model of parsing out functionality according to what they think you need is outdated. If you don't like something about your software your only option is to wait for the next release which may or may not address your issues.; Why should you be limited to solutions conceived by people who know nothing about your business?
Open Source Software is Different.: Very different. The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.; This rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

Our Preferred Tools

PHP
Yahoo switched to PHP in 2002. Here's a presentation explaining why.

MySQL
Again, Yahoo supplies a review in favour of the popular database. If it works for Yahoo! Finance, perhaps it can work for you.

Perl & Bash
Perl has been around longer than the World Wide Web. It isn't our choice for serving content, but Perl can't be beat when it comes to automated system administration and file processing. Nothing beats a quality shell script (Bash) for system level tasks like replication.

HTML, JavaScript & Cascading Style Sheets
The bread and butter of the Internet. When developing web applications these are the components responsible for displaying data in your browser.

Apache
Netcraft's Web Server Survey draws from over 96 million webservers and puts Apache's market share among active sites at over 60%. The number 2 server vendor, Microsoft, is a distant 31% which includes IIS and all variants.

Linux
Linux is the operating system of choice for webservers due to reliability and capability. Still/Moving develops on Linux for one reason above all others: author on the target platform. If a web application is destined to run on a linux server, it only makes sense that it be developed in the same environment. Of course, there are a lot of other reasons which are mostly subjective.