Development Update

After a phone call with a prospect customer the other day, we thought we'd better summarise some of the things we've been doing lately which don't involve training (as generally training takes up only a handful of days per month).

Email Application

This has consisted of support and maintenance of a legacy application which is used to send email campaigns. The code base spans a number of developers and is probably around 8 years old. New development has included creating an XMLRPC and SOAP interface for customers to interact with, along with XML file based upload.

Finally, the customer has recently expanded to host a seperate instance of the application within the UK; for this we've undertaken the systems administration, installation and configuration (RHEL, PowerMTA etc) and rewritten parts of the application to utilise PHP5's enhanced object model and, primarily, to improve performance. To this end, we believe the application can now compile mail to be sent at a rate of roughly 500/second (which is at least a tenfold increase in performance).
We've added a significant number of unit tests to the new code we've added, as well as taking advantage of PHP5's many improvements (and the Zend Framework).

Spidering Application

This consisted of rewriting an in-house, proof of concept PHP application with the aim of enhancing performance. The refactored application uses a Python based backend (allowing it to spider multiple webpages at once) with a PHP based web user interface.
Results are collected from a number of public search engines, parsed and then stored in a database - allowing an inhouse application to infer links and relationships.

Mobile store

This project has just started, and involves rewriting an existing site which acts as an online store for ring tones and other mobile based content - which is viewed from mobile phones themselves. The project uses the Zend Framework extensively.

New Website

Adrian, who has officially left us at the end of his Industrial placement year, has been hard at work creating a new website for us - which will hopefully be live in the next few weeks. Based on Drupal, it should provide a new look for our website, as well as being easier for us to integrate with other systems we have - and a new theme. We're also hoping it will make the website easier to navigate (and cause us to simplify our content as we port it across).

Finally, as Adrian left, he was 'replaced' with Peter - who is a full time employee, with skills in Perl, Python, PHP and more.