4Q Road Map
Our goal is to deliver high-quality software to our clients. Therefore, our development team develops software with market-leading technologies. We currently favor the following products:
Java:
The Java programming language is our choice for implementing our applications. It is platform-independent and widely supported and used across companies worldwide.
Apache Tomcat:
Tomcat is an application container in which Java-based web applications run. It is free, scalable and highly performant.
Spring Framework:
The Spring Framework supports rapid development of applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. Each of our applications is three-tiered and loosely coupled. This means we can exchange components in each tier with ease and this reduces development effort, increases maintainability and speeds up implementation.
Hibernate:
Hibernate is an object relational mapping framework. It bridges the gap between databases and modern programming languages. All database operations are mapped to Java objects and methods. Think of it as an abstraction layer for the database. The big advantage is that the underlying database can be switched easily with only a few changes in configuration files. For example, we could use the free MySQL database and when requirements change we can switch to more performant solutions.
FreeMarker:
FreeMarker is our favored view technology (remember the MVC pattern). With FreeMarker we generate our frontends, all the things you can see, be it XHTML web pages or emails.
ExtJS and Google Web Toolkit:
Dynamic web frontends become more and more common. When using such AJAX based technologies we favor one of the leading widget frameworks, ExtJS, in combination with the Google Web Toolkit, the latter one allowing to implement everything in Java and then compiling the frontend to JavaScript.
Eclipse:
The Eclipse development environment (IDE) is our number one choice for developing applications.
Each developer must adhere to our quality standards. This includes, for example:
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Extensive documentation of the source code and underlying data models.
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Code reviews to spot errors and find elegant solutions to difficult problems.
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Automatic and continuous testing of implemented functionality.
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Adhering to industry standards (XML, XHTML, etc.).
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Research best-practice solutions for a problem first before implementing own solutions.
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Build on top of our approved products (see above).
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Use of design patterns while architecturing applications.