SIGNITEK Software Development Services

Software Development

The most important issues with software development are to consider your needs. At SIGNITEK, we make your needs our needs. We are not going to sell you some proprietary technology because it happens to be fashionable today.

We encourage you to carefully consider the appropriate balance between the long term costs and the short term costs:

	For example, using proprietary technology (a favorite approach of many software houses) may get the job done quickly and produce an efficient product, but how much will it cost to maintain? Technology venders want you to buy updates and software maintenance costs can escalate if you have trouble finding the expertise to maintain your software.
	On the other hand, new technology nearly always exists to fill a need for greater efficiency in software development. At SIGNITEK we ask: which new technology (if any) can you benefit the most from and will it meet your needs?

With careful planning you can circumvent many of these problems.

Here are a few of our technology focuses these days:

Microsoft.NET languages

These are really interesting. They are free for anyone to download and you can develop web pages and other software quite effectively without paying a penny. Technically speaking they are not proprietary although it is not clear when other vendors are going to adapt them for other platforms beyond the Windows/Intel platforms.

Javascript

Visual Basic.NET

C#

Web Development

	Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP)
	Java Server Pages and Servlets
	XSLT
	Microsoft.NET

Java

	AWT
	Swing
	J2EE

XML

	Both Microsoft and Apache
	XSLT
	XML DOM

C++/GTK (for both Windows and Linux)

We are very excited about developing GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications. Java/Swing is very slow and C++/MFC is not portable. There are a number of new libraries out there including GTK and wxWindows that allow one to write fast programs in C++ but still be portable. No source code changes are necessary to run a GTK program on Linux for example.

Some of the older technologies we anticipate continuing use with are:

Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and web security

C++

We've added a lot of courseware: 25 days of lab/lecture material!

Both Microsoft and GNU

Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)

MFC

ActiveX Template Library

Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) and COM+

	These are areas that are often not well understood
	SQL Server and Access

When considering hiring anybody to perform some software development, the important questions to ask are:

	Is vendor independence important?
	Is efficiency important?
	Is cost important?

In our courses on Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, students learn that one has several choices as diagrammed below in the famous triangle of software design. You can have any two, but you can never have all three.

Picking any two could mean you can have it cheap and defect free, but it will take a long time to produce. Or it could mean you can have it defect free and produced quickly, but it will be very expensive.

Software Development

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