Technology
Hogsmill are fully committed to Open-Source technologies; their use in our
developments are described below. These technologies are highly reliable and
proven technologies that are used in the development of some of the
world's largest, and best, web sites.
There are many benefits from using Open-Source technologies, including (but not limited to):
- Reliability. Open-source software gets fixed regularly by those in the community - bugs are not prioritised by any financial pressures to make a particular release. Therefore, they are more often more reliable than commercial programs.
- Availability. Open-source typically does not become 'no longer supported' as soon as you get the hang of it. You won't need to keep buying new releases just to keep your stuff working!
- Cost-effectiveness. As there are no licencing implications, open-source is always cheaper than commercial software.
Apache
Hogsmill websites are built on the highly reliable Apache HTTP server -
often described as the most reliable software program in the world. This
server is highly configurable to suit any application, regardless of the
site's file or server structure, and the format of the URLs used in
navigation.
PHP
PHP is an industry standard language used on many commercial sites around the world. It allows for rapid protyping and development, and, because it is "embedded" in (HTML) web pages, allows designers and developers to work easily together. The PHPB bulletin board, written entirely in PHP, is among the langauge's great success stories.
This flexibility allows us to take an existing design, and simply add in required funcitonality. We have found this to be an extremely quick and cost-effective way of developing sites.
PHP allows a very simple and reliable interface to MySQL databases (see
below), allowing Hogsmill to build extremely rich database-driven sites
in many domains, including:
- Recruitment and job listing sites.
- Event listings and handling; on-line calendars, etc.
- E-commerce sites.
- Content Management Systems (CMSs).
Hogsmill specialise in taking existing static web sites, and adding PHP
and AJAX (see below) functionality to bring them up-to-date and
increase their functionality. This is an extremely cost effective way
of improving a web site without having the whole thing re-built from
scratch.
Perl
Perl is an industry standard programming language used on many of the world's top web sites, including the BBC, Yahoo!, and many banking sites. It is a highly flexible language, tightly integrated with Apache server by use of mod_perl. It can be used cross-platform, and Hogsmill have built sites in perl on Windows, (various flavours of) Linux and UNIX.
One of the key features if perl is the vast number of pre-built modules in the CPAN libraray. These modules allow rapid development, avoiding any 're-inventing of the wheel'. The modules are highly reliable, and each comes with a set of tests that can be downloaded to prove their reliability by anyone who wishes to do so.
Perl now supports full seperation of application layers (MVC) using Catalyst or other modules (such as CGI::Prototype), and Hogsmill have developed using many of these, and proprietary frameworks, in a number of situations.
All Hogsmill perl sites use the latest perl technology including Inside Out Objects, and Test Driven Development (TDD) to ensure maximum reliability, future-proofing and security.
MySQL
MySQL is an open source fully SQL-compliant database server that is particular suited to web site development due to it's cheapness, availablilty and installation footprint. It is, however, a highly reliable database engne, used on many of the world's largest sites (the BBC again, Digital Look, etc.)
Hogsmill use pre-defined MySQL schemas to allow rapid deployment of web sites using LAMP (or WAMP) technology; tables for default parts of the site - contacts, blogs, news, etc., etc. - are already available 'out of the box' at the start of development, so increasing reliability and reducing lead time.
jQuery and JavaScript
Javascript is a browser programming language that extends browser functionality without having to re-load the page every time something changes. Simple examples are the changing colours on the tabs above, but much more complex behaviour can also be programmed; animations, changing values of one part of the page depending on the value of another, and form and input validaiton, to name but a few.
jQuery takes this a step further, providing libraries and plug-ins to make development of JavaScript functionality that much easier. The expanding/contracting boxes on the client area are written using jQuery, as is most of the browser funcitonality of the site (we use some legacy code...). jQuery is used by some of the biggest names in the business including the BBC, Ladbrokes and Vauxhall - all sites worked on by Hogsmill.
Hogsmill developed the streaming POD technology on the PLUS Markets site, and much of the animation on the Turquoise site. These are good examples of how jQuery can make a web site into a fully-featured Web 2.0 application.
COMET
COMET is an extention to AJAX that uses "server-push" to retrive information instead of "browser-pull", i.e. rather than the browser polling the server every (say) 10 seconds, the browser simply sends information to the browser whenever it changes. This is great for real-time applicaitons like stock prices, or tailing log files.
Hogsmill have developed both COMET and (more usually) "pseudo-COMET" - where the browser uses "long polling" to get information as it changes - sites for major sites in the broadcast and banking industries.
Operating Systems
Hogsmill have developed in Windows (2000 to Vista and Windows 7), Linux and UNIX, using all the technologies above; as far as the client is concerned, the Operating System their site runs is irrelevant, and we will decide which to use in a case-by-case basis, e.g. what OS does the ISP provide?