Technology
Introduction
Most of our web development work is carried out using the
Microsoft suite of products. We use industry standards & follow Microsoft's recommended patterns & practice, wherever possible. In addition, we make pragmatic use of third-party & open-source technologies.
Listed below are the main products & techniques we use. Most projects require some new or unique technical elements to be addressed, so if you do not see exactly what you want, please ask - we may already be learning about it or know someone we can recommend.
Server-side coding
Whenever we build websites that require interaction with a database, we use Microsoft's
ASP.NET. This includes many different technologies under its umbrella - in particular all our server-side scripting is done using
C#.
The
Content Management System (Kentico CMS) we use is itself built using the ASP.NET platform.
For
Web Applications we may use Microsoft's Model View Controller (
MVC) Framework (which is itself built on ASP.NET) along with the ADO.NET
Entity Framework and
LINQ (language integrated query).
Client-side coding
Pages are built using
XHTML for layout and
CSS for styling.
We use
JavaScript or libraries based on it like
jQuery to code things that happen under the control of the browser & end-user.
For rich, interactive web-applications we also make use of
AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XHTML).
Server (hosting) infrastructure
Our applications typically use Microsoft's
IIS (Internet Information Services) and
SQL Server.
Where we host websites on behalf of clients, we use a dedicated third-party hosting company for this purpose, and can also arrange
TLS (transport layer security) when the secure
HTTPS protocol is to be used.
Industry standards
We strive to use industry standards and in particular those published by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
These include the use of
XHTML and
CSS as well as the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Coding principles & practices
When we design and build an application, we typically make use of Microsoft's recommended patterns & practices. For example, data-driven applications will be built in layers (tiers) such as presentation, business logic & data-access.