Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP.NET)

For the development of database-driven web sites, Blueberry prefers to use ASP.NET and MS SQL Server (see below).

Blueberry has some skills on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform (we use Linux extensively on internal servers), but our development expertise is on the Microsoft platform, and we prefer to use C#.

In truth, it’s difficult to get objective comparisons between platforms like ASP.NET, LAMP and Ruby-on-Rails. Becoming an expert developer on any one platform takes at least a few years, and very few people honestly have large-project experience on more than one. Unfortunately, developers have a tendency to adopt a religious attitude – zealously defending their platform as the best. Blueberry’s approach is different – if a new technology is provably more productive, we’re interested.

At present, our view is that ASP.NET is more productive: we particularly like the large market of third-party components which is available on the .NET platform.

Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is our preferred database system. Again, our preference is partly informed by history – we’ve used SQL Server since 2000, and we have built up considerable expertise. But MS SQL does seem to have cost advantages over Oracle, and the feature set is definitely superior to MySQL.

Microsoft’s recent introduction of MS SQL Express - a completely free version of SQL Server - has changed the playing field at the low end of the market. There is now very little justification for using Access MDB files to store data. SQL Express is limited to a 1GB database, and 1GB of RAM on a single CPU, but this is perfectly adequate for small workgroups and many websites.

MySQL

Blueberry has used MySQL on a number of projects, and we’re happy to use it if a customer prefers that we do. However, it is important to realise that although MySQL is open-source, it is not free for commercial use.

Web Services

Web Services is one of the big software success stories of the past 5 years – it is a technology that really does deliver what it promises, and is also very simple to use.

The concept is simple: provide a standardised way for two computers to communicate over the internet, through firewalls. The reason for the success of web services – where previous standards have failed – is also down to simplicity. Standards like CORBA and DCOM were incredibly complicated and required expensive experts to configure the servers. Web services are the opposite: a server publishes a list of functions, and the client can call them. One of the particularly clever aspects of web-services is that they are self-documenting; if a server publishes a function called “BookHotel”, then the full details of that function are available as a web page, automatically. This considerably reduces integration costs.

Blueberry has used Web Services on many projects; we have plenty of expertise in all aspects of this technology.

AJAX

AJAX is the web-development technology that makes web-sites interactive. In the early days of the web, any change on the page required a round-trip: when a user pressed a button, the whole page had to be regenerated by the server, causing a significant delay, and a large flicker. This problem was partially solved by using frames which divide the screen into parts - but it took AJAX to solve it completely. AJAX uses an extra feature built into the browser to allow it to asynchronously run pieces of JavaScript code. This code communicates with the server using XML and updates the screen without the big delay or flicker.

AJAX has allowed web-sites to become far more interactive and responsive. However, AJAX does not come without a cost: because web browsers were never really designed for it - and because it uses JavaScript intensively - it can cause browser compatibility issues. For example, slight differences in the approach to coding can break a piece of code on one browser. These problems have been overcome by the use of AJAX toolkits – carefully assembled libraries of JavaScript that work on all major browsers. The upshot of all this is that AJAX is probably best described as a ‘transitional’ technology.

For these reasons, AJAX development is more expensive than client-side GUI development, but it does make web-sites far more interactive and it has benefits over technologies like Flash. Blueberry has delivered a number of large sites which make extensive use of AJAX, with excellent results.

Flash

Invented by Macromedia, who were then bought by Adobe, Flash is a web technology strongly associated with animation and online graphics. In fact, Flash is capable of a lot more than this, and is sometimes used to implement complete web-sites.

Flash has a peculiar position in the world of web technology. On the one hand, it’s a technology that allows easy delivery of rich, interactive applications via the web. It is cross-platform and cross-browser, with a high installed base. On the other hand, the primary Flash development tools were always designed for graphics people, not developers, which has limited its adoption as a general tool for web-application deliver. Arguably, it also suffers from poor standards compatibility: Flash applications don’t generally support the back/next interface of the browser, and it’s difficult to make a Flash application which is accessible. For these reasons, most technical developers of database driven web sites (like Amazon) have tended to ignore Flash.

Blueberry has unusually strong technical expertise with Flash due to our experience with BB FlashBack, which we created for our sister company, Blueberry Software. This software actually writes out Flash (SWF) files which contain recorded movies of screen activity.

However, we are not a design agency – if a customer requires strong Flash-based artwork within a project, we would call in a separate graphics designer to assist.

Silverlight

Silverlight is Microsoft’s ‘next-generation’ approach to building interactive, rich-media web-sites - the so-called Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

One of the ironies of today’s internet is that people have such a high acceptance of the very limited functionality offered by the web. On the PC, we make full use of the mouse – dragging and dropping, resizing windows, right clicking - but on the web, these advanced features are mostly missing. When these features are used on a website, technical people get very excited, even though in programming terms, this is really simple stuff.

Silverlight aims to change all this, by providing a strong, powerful, cross-browser platform for developers like Blueberry to use, with full support for all these features.

Silverlight is not the only route to RIA. Adobe’s Flash technology, particularly when combined with Flex, is a powerful solution. And AJAX is already delivering strong RIA web-sites.

But Silverlight has some strong benefits over these technologies. Firstly, it’s been designed from the ground up for this purpose. AJAX, by comparison, is trying to patch up the inefficiencies and incompatibilities of JavaScript. Secondly, it’s aimed firmly at developers, whereas Flash has always been aimed at designers first, developers second. Thirdly, it’s built on top of .NET technologies, which many Microsoft developers are highly familiar with. Fourthly, there is already a huge market developing in Silverlight components – an extremely important step in reducing the cost of application development.

There are certainly issues with Silverlight: it requires a plugin which users need to install (although MS will obviously install this onto most PCs using Windows Update). As of August 2008, Silverlight still isn't released, and support on Mac and Linux is still a work-in-progress. Microsoft absolutely needs to honour its promise to make Silverlight work on all platforms.

But we at Blueberry are optimistic about Silverlight – we think it will transform web-site development. It will probably have the biggest initial impact on projects where there is a controlled audience, but in due course, we expect to see it being used for major projects, such as online supermarkets.

We firmly expect that the compelling benefit of Silverlight will be its ability to deliver rich, interactive web applications at a considerably reduced cost, when compared with AJAX.