Deciding whether a web-site might better be called an “application” can be tricky – but in general if the site presents forms and stores data in a database – it’s a web app.

Microinformatix has been actively involved with the development of web-based applications for over a decade. Over this period, the Internet has seen vast expansion – and the tools and technologies available for web development have evolved beyond recognition.

We have all the skills required to deliver your online system:

• We have strong expertise with Microsoft IIS and ASP.NET 2.0 – the leading Microsoft Platform for web-site delivery.
• We are experts in MS SQL Server and MySQL, used at the server side to manage the database.
• We have strong experties with Apache and PHP as well as Java Server Pages
• We also have strong expertise in JavaScript and AJAX – technologies necessary to deliver the interactivity required by web-site users.

Creating a new web application or online system is a significant software development project, which requires careful management. You can read about how we work with you to understand your needs and make sure we deliver the system you want.

If you’d like to understand more about the technologies we use to implement leading-edge online systems and web-applications, please continue reading.

Hosting and Development Platforms

Microinformatix primarily uses Microsoft tools for web-application development – which means we use Microsoft Server 2003, which includes Microsoft IIS / ASP.NET as the web-server. We generally use Microsoft SQL Server as the back-end database. We use Microsoft tools primarily because we believe they allow us to be more productive. We can write the system code using C#, which is a very modern and powerful language.

In the beginning, the web used HTML. HTML was originally a very simple way for people to write pages which included text, graphics – and links to other pages. The extreme simplicity of HTML powered it’s very quick adoption, and launched the web. HTML has since been massively extended, which has led to huge problems with browser compatibility which continue to cause web-developers headaches on a day-to-day basis. The core problem is that HTML simply wasn’t designed for the purpose it is being used for – which means it doesn’t work that well.

In recent years, there has been a major push to find ways to develop “rich internet applications” – i.e. web-sites which are significantly more interactive than plain-HTML sites, and provide users with more interesting and convenient ways to obtain information.

The major alternative to Microsoft technologies is Linux. You may hear the acronym “LAMP” mentioned – this stands for “Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP”, and refers to a collection of technologies commonly used together on Linux-hosted web-applications. Linux platform has some strong benefits – notably that components are mostly free – and we see good sites being developed using LAMP. Hence, we offer these technologies as an alternative to clients who have budget constrains.