The software and tools we use.
Between the team at Kintek, we have experience with a wide range of web technologies. Given the choice, we generally recommend a typical web application configuration should be built on LAMP and DHTML stacks.
PHP 5
PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) is a free, open source, object oriented programming language. It is also the most widely used server-side language in the world, boasting over 20 million websites worldwide.
MySQL 5
MySQL is often considered the "baby" of the databse world, when compared to the giant IBM, Oracle and Microsoft database solutions. However, given the fact that MySQL was one of the first and best free database management systems, it has quickly gained a huge amount of popularity.
MySQL is usually the database of choice for websites due to it's tight integration with other technologies, such as PHP and Apache, mentioned elsewhere on this page.
This popularity helps to keep MySQL well supported and secure, with new features constantly being added.
Zend Framework
Zend Framework is a library of PHP code that provides a solid foundation for web applications. It means you don't have to waste time rewriting code that provides user authentication, database searching, image resizing, and countless other tasks.
It's also MVC oriented. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, and is a design pattern that helps to separate data, display and control. The idea being if you were to change your back-end database, you only need to update your Models, and the rest of the website can remain exactly as it was.
Javascript & Ajax
Javascript originated as a web scripting language, and most people will remember it as being responsible for the annoying popups, animations and such in the early days of the web.
Today, however, it has matured into a fully-fledged client-side programming language. We use it to add interactivity and increase usability in websites.
The most important thing to understand about Javascript is this: Javascript is not Java.
AJAX is an acroynm standing for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Lots of modern websites use AJAX to give users a quicker, more responsive interface, much more like a traditional computer program. With AJAX, requests to the server are made Asynchronously so that you can continue to click around the page in the mean time. If you have ever used Gmail, thats a great example of how AJAX makes for a smooth, easy to use web interface.
One of our developers once summed it up best:
"Ajax is not a language or a technology. It's a way of life"
jQuery
jQuery is an open source Javascript framework. As with Zend Framework above, it provides a great foundation for writing Javascript. It allows simple, attractive animations, and makes writing Ajax, and controlling other behaviour of a website much quicker and easier.
XHTML & CSS
XHTML is a modern subset of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), the common language of all websites. The "X" stands for eXtensible, and is usually included just to make the foundations of websites we build all begin with modern, semantically correct, clean and cross browser compatible XHTML code. To give your website the best exposure, our pages are built to look great in all the major browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS was created to enable the separation of website presentation (fonts, colours, layout, etc) from the website content. We utilise CSS to remove the styling of your page from the structure, leaving clean code which Search Engines love to read.
Search engines are interested in content, not code. The easier is is for them to access website content, the better your chance of ranking well for your content.
As an added benifit, CSS allows you to control the style of multiple pages at once. Want to change the font and colour of all the headings in your site? CSS lets you edit the single style declaration for heading tags. The results appear immediately on all your pages.
Apache
Apache is the worlds most widely used Web Server Platform. With over 50% market share of the entire internet its not hard to see why this is a great technology.
The best part is, Apache is free!
A Web Server is the software which accepts requests from internet users and other servers, processes them and serves the response back. Every web page you visit is being processed by a Web Server Platform and chances are it was Apache.
The nearest competitor for Web Server Market Share is Microsofts IIS (Internet Information Services). Unlike Apache, IIS will only run on Windows and requires a Windows License.
We choose to use Apache because not only is it free and highly popular, it intergrates well with other technologies we utilise such as PHP and MySQL.
Apache is well supported by a large group of core developers and due to its massive popularity even in corporate environments, its constantly being improved and kept secure.
Occasionally, the above tools may not be the ideal choice for certain jobs. When appropriate, we utilise the following platforms.
J2EE
The Java Platform Enterprise Edition, J2EE or Java EE as it is commonly known as, is an industry standard framework used for developing large-scale enterprise applications. It is widely used because of three main reasons; it's 100% free, it's well documented, and it's platform independent, meaning an application built using Java EE can run on any operating system.
Some examples of Java EE built applications include online banking and ticketing. While it is widely used within the corporate environment or on large scale website, its complexity makes it rather inappropriate for small websites and ecommerce solutions.
We can however incorporate Java EE technology into your website on request. We are skilled at creating and embedding Applets (a program that runs in a HTML page on the client side) or Java Servlets (a program that runs on the server side). We are also experienced at developing and interacting with J2EE Web Services (automated business services that interact with each other on the server side).
Microsoft .NET
.NET is a software framework developed by Microsoft which allows developers to code in a large variety of languages. The downfall of this is that the complete form of .NET is only available on the Windows operating system, and so most applications built in .NET must be run on Windows.
.NET is similar to Java in the respect that it is used for large scale (and frequently corporate) applications. Traditionally .NET is used for developing desktop applications, however with the increasing need to interact with online data, we can custom build desktop applications that incorporate web services. We can also customise your software solution to be completely web-based using ASP.NET.
Adobe Flash
Everyone knows Flash. Practically anything you've ever seen on the web which was "Cool", highly Animated or Video was probably Flash. Infact if it wasn't for Flash, Video on the Web would have never taken off so quickly. Just look at every single Video player on the web today. All of it Flash Video! Youtube anyone?
Naturally too much overuse of Flash is a bad thing. Its important your pages load quickly and do not distract your users from your websites purpose.
We never use flash where unnecessary, however like all web technologies it has its place. Due to the fact that Search Engines do not read text content from Flash, only high impact call to actions and dynamic looking page elements are best built in Flash.
Video on your website is the future of impact marketing. You don't have to be on TV to have your own Television Advertisement. We can help you get web video deployed onto your website allowing you to reach your customers in new ways.
Like other web technologies, Flash also has its own subset programming language called ActionScript which allows advanced scripted animation and web application like capabilities. We provide ActionScript programming as a service for existing Flash projects or new dynamic web ventures.
