Technology

The Ubiquity library provides a range of open source components--from Ajax libraries to browser extensions--that work together to deliver a fresh approach to web application building.

wxWidgets is a portable, open-source C++ class library that provides APIs for a huge number of common programming tasks. It facilitates a native look and feel on each supported platform by abstracting the system APIs for areas such as UI, graphics, disk management, network access, threading, process interaction and so on.

libcurl is an open-source multi-protocol file transfer library that we use in Sidewinder. It is written in C, but has numerous bindings that make it available to other languages. The chief benefit of using libcurl for us is that the code is highly portable, which means we can rely on re-using our code across many platforms. Furthermore, libcurl is efficient, robust and has a very helpful, well-informed online community.

EC2 is Amazon's 'processing in the cloud' service and RightScale is a system for managing EC2. EC2 provides a set of web services which allow you to start and stop server instances.

But whilst EC2 is incredibly powerful, managing the processes still takes quite a bit of work. It's definitely less involved than trying to manage lots of physical servers in your own rack, but there is still a lot to do, and the RightScale service aims to make it easier. RightScale offers a browser interface through which you can start and stop instances, but that isn't its real strength; through the use of RightScripts they don't just make managing an EC2 instance easier, they've invented a new kind of service.

WebKit is the open-source rendering engine at the heart of Apple's Safari web browser and many other commercial software packages. Key goals for the WebKit project include three that are very close to our own hearts: stability, performance and standards compliance. WebKit's track record in all three of these areas is exemplary, as evinced by it being the first publicly available rendering engine to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid 3 test, for instance. Work is underway to integrate WebKit with Sidewinder, with the ultimate aim being to make it the default rendering engine.

XForms is a mark-up language from the W3C for describing all kinds of interactive user interfaces, from simple name and address forms, to shopping-carts, to long and detailed forms such as mortgage and life insurance applications, through to desktop applications.

The team at webBackplane has expertise and experience in XForms that is unparalled.

The Semantic Web seems elusive both as a reality, and even as a concept. But at webBackplane we see it as central to the next generation of web applications. We understand RDF in a way that very few companies do, to the extent that it was our Managing Director Mark Birbeck, who devised and proposed RDFa as part of his work at the W3C. He has remained central to the initiative ever since, being the lead author of the RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing document, and joint author of the RDFa Primer (with Ben Adida from Creative Commons).

At webBackplane we're also familiar with various open source tools that are part of the semantic web family, such as Jena and Sesame, and we've also created some of our own software, such as a JavaScript RDFa parser.

MySQL is probably the most well known and popular open source relational database, and we use it for many of our projects. In the past we invariably used Microsoft's SQL Server for our customers' projects, but whilst it is clearly an impressive product, as MySQL improved over the years it became increasingly difficult for us to recommend making the expenditure.

Within our team we have a great deal of experience of using and managing SQL databases, as well as helping to plan and create their layout and structure.

Of course everyone uses XML now—why wouldn't you? But at webBackplane our expertise in XML runs deep. For example, we've contributed to books on the subject, provided consultancy on why companies should use it (back in the days when it was less obvious than it is now), and have an in-depth understanding of associated languages such as XML Schema and XSLT.

We're also familiar with the subtleties of different parsers, and have experience of tools and platforms that rely on XML at their core, such as Cocoon and eXist.

eXist is an open source XML database that is quite rightly attracting a lot of interest. There are many databases available that provide XML features as an 'add on', but there are very few that deal with XML natively. Built right into the heart of the database is the ability to search for data using XPath and XQuery, to store and retrieve XML without having to convert it in any way, and most importantly, access to all of this is achieved via RESTful interfaces. This makes eXist ideal for any application that is XML from beginning to end, since the client can store and retrieve data from the database without the need for an intermediate layer.

eXist forms a key part of our web application philosophy, based on the ideas of skimming. [Link to a skimming page, as well as talks I've done that have featured eXist.]

Drupal is earning a reputation as the most popular content management system available. People may debate whether it's architecturally the best or not, but what can't be questioned is the enthusiasm and energy that surrounds the project, such that there are an enormous number of extension modules that can be added to a basic Drupal project. In fact, the flexibility of Drupal is such that, although we have expertise in a number of areas, we still have to start each project with the question 'why wouldn't we do this with Drupal'?

We have experience with creating custom modules, building themes, and generally doing lots of interesting things with Drupal. We can also host and manage Drupal sites.