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Your choice of technologies is critical to achieving your desired results. It's not necessarily the newest technology, but rather the combination that make the most sense for your particular project and your budget. Investment preservation: means working with the technology or infrastructure you are currently using. For example, if you have an existing system in Access and need to upgrade to an enterprise solution, migration to .NET will be less costly and less risky than migration to Caché or J2EE and will allow you to preserve your investment in equipment, software and user education; however, an existing MUMPS system is more easily migrated to Caché.
Integration requirements: considers what technologies work best with the systems you already have and plan to continue using. For example, if you need to integrate your new solution with Microsoft Exchange, .NET is most likely the best solution.
Software reuse: recommended so long as the solution meets the investment preservation and integration requirements. We offer
- cost-effective application of reusable code (software developed previously that can be customized to your needs);
- open-source software (free software often based on the Linux OS); and
- commercial (AKA off-the-shelf) software that fits your requirements with some customization.
Maintenance: Typically, the more common the technology, the cheaper the maintenance, e.g., LAMP stack's extensive usage makes it inexpensive to maintain.
Operating systems: LINUX OS or Windows Server 2003We usually suggest the use of either the LINUX OS or Windows Server 2003 for our applications, depending on the reasons listed above, although we also write programs for the Mac OS.
For high-transaction systems, with a need to scale exponentially and quickly, LINUX is still the answer; while integration requirements with an existing system may dictate building a system on Windows Server 2003.
Choosing server-side database and programming language software
There are two requirements that are generally contradictory: performance and cost-efficiency. Recent studies show that among databases there are three primary candidates for high performance: Oracle and MySQL when tied with a J2EE environment and MS SQL when tied with an ASP.NET environment. Therefore, we choose one of these bundles if a different choice is not dictated by integration requirements.
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