Technology

Technological architecture is an integral part of your systems design. There are a number of viable alternatives available in today's ever changing market place. Radial have experience developing solutions that have used the following configurations :

Ruby on Rails

Rails justifiably caused an immense wave of interest upon it's initial release with many believing they'd found the middle ground between PHP's ease of development a J2EE's enterprise APIs. The truth of the matter is that even once you've dug deeper than the initial database-driven-web-app-in-5-minutes promotional material, Rails is one of the nicest, logically structured and well thought out web frameworks in existence. It provides a clean and USEFUL API that focuses on most of the stuff you do, most of the time.

Ruby is a very terse, dynamic, object-oriented language that empowers developers with a great deal of flexibility within a simple syntactic structure. The combination of Ruby with Rails provides an accelerated framework to develop complex solutions.

With Twitter pioneering a high volume Rails based solution, the framework has proved it CAN scale to an extremely high volume of traffic and many feel that Rails could start to replace LAMP based solutions (see below).

AJAX / Web 2.0

Times they are a-changing and websites are getting richer user interfaces. AJAX puts more focus back on the GUI and giving the user a more intuitive experience and that is a very welcome leap forward.

That can only be a good thing right? Well, yes and no. Like most things, AJAX comes at a price; in terms of development effort and other considerations such as SEO. Radial were early adopters of AJAX techniques and are well placed to develop solutions and perhaps more importantly, advise when perhaps it's NOT the most appropriate solution.

Java & Oracle

Java is a mature language that has established itself as powerful force in Internet development due to its portability and well-established application interface. It is an object-oriented language which lends itself to a more logical abstraction of real world scenarios, promotes code reuse and encourage design best practices. J2EE is set of specifications implemented in Java aimed to provide enterprise level server side solutions for multi-tier environments.

Oracle is the largest provider of commercial relational / object-relational database systems. Their product includes a wealth of features to aid the design and development of secure and robust solutions. Java integrates tightly with Oracle within the database and as part of the current application server release - 9ias. These technologies combine to provide an extremely flexible and powerful enterprise solution.

LAMP

The acronym LAMP is often used for systems that incorporate the following components :

The combination of these systems provides a cheap, robust, reliable high performance alternative configuration above.