In 1997 Broccoli Products created a website for an aviation company that allowed pilots to request their next flight-plan over the Internet. Flight plans combining route points with current weather and air-traffic data could be viewed and modified by the pilot from their hotel room using an Internet browser on a laptop. Since then we have continued to develop website projects, including providing patients with online access to their medical test results, processing credit-card payments, mail order tracking, database driven forums and blog-spots, shopping baskets, three-stage inter-business transactions, online application installation and upgrading,
account payment chasing customized by the creditor, and secure transfer of human and porcine genetic data over the Internet.
Our websites integrate features that make them attractive to search engine web-bots - the mechanisms that search-engines use to index websites. The position of a website in a list of search results can be improved by combining good page-indexing techniques with low-cost scalable advertising.
Website development is faster than application development,
changes to websites are often trivial, and websites can be developed off-site, reducing the cost of permanent site presence.
Our scope of internet development includes the following:
MVC + Azure Cloud
MVC (Model View Controller) is a website development framework that
allows business websites to be created very quickly by applying the
single-role principle to website development.
The cloud is a
large combination of computer servers distributed around the World,
and these servers combine to form one massive virtual computing
resource. You can store databases, websites, queues and files in the
cloud as well as run applications.
Azure is the Microsoft
cloud.
The benefit of cloud computing is that the entire
website application can be hosted on servers that are managed by
highly-specialized server administration staff. This is an
attractive alternative to purchasing hardware yourself, setting up a
server, and administering the server and firewall.
Using Azure as your server is cheap. Hosting a website in the
cloud for small and medium sized applications costs a few pounds a
week. (You also get 90 days free.)
Combining MVC and Azure allows
complex business website applications to be quickly created and made
available anywhere in the World. Information held in the cloud
can be downloaded using a browser, Windows application, mobile phone
or tablet.
As well as MVC, the cloud will also host standard
ASP.NET websites.
ASP.NET 4
ASP.NET 4 (Active Server Pages for .Net 4) is the leading Internet
development framework and allows developers to create websites with
complex data, computing and interface content.
Broccoli Products develops ASP.NET 4 using JavaScript, C#, Ajax and web forms. These tools are freely available, and the code we
develop is readable, even by clients with little software experience.
If you do not house web-servers on your premises there are many Internet service providers (ISPs) that will accommodate and maintain your website
and database on their premises at little expense, or you can host
your website in the cloud.
PHP
PHP is a widely used scripting language for generating dynamic web content, and is constantly being redeveloped by it's creators. Unlike ASP.NET, PHP is not
multiparadigmatic. It is a function-for-every-occasion language,
and simpler and quicker to develop than its ASP.NET equivalent.
PHP is supported by the majority of ISPs, and tools for developing PHP are freely available on the Internet. PHP is usually accompanied by MySQL, a simple database
engine that is again, freely available. Adding PHP and MySQL
functionality promotes a website from a source of information, into a
fully-blown online service that will handle user accounts, process online credit card payments, automatically send emails, and house forums for discussion groups.
Silverlight
Silverlight is the Microsoft plugin for Internet browsers. It is
similar to Adobe Flash in that audio, video and vector animation can be
downloaded and presented very effectively.
Silverlight
uses the same development framework as Windows applications, so code
developed for applications and websites can easily be ported to
Silverlight.
Because Silverlight's development environment
is more sophisticated than Adobe Flash's, Silverlight plugins can be
developed that provide not just moving graphics, but also the interface
functionality of a Windows application, and super-efficient use of
network bandwidth. All hosted within a browser.
If you want
to amaze a potential investor by showing them a website that looks like
nothing they've seen before, then Silverlight, with its combination of
vector animation and .Net Framework, will do just that.
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a vector graphics plug-in available for website browsers. Flash adds style and
graphics to a website in a way that HTML and JavaScript cannot do, or at least could not do before HTML5.
The Flash plug-in,
which is compatible with the majority of browser software, is freely available from the Adobe.
An example of a Flash banners is shown on the right.
Other uses of Flash include micro-adverts often placed on a third-parties websites, and navigation-bars providing an enhanced drop-down menu.
Flash advert development is fast, usually because the demands are small.
For complicated jobs Flash has a scripting language. For an example of a Flash applet that uses the script language, see
The Art Puzzle.
Selling over the Internet
In order to sell products over the Internet a website must provide an online shopping basket, a checkout, and an order tracking facility.
There exist credit-card processing websites that provide all of this functionality.
Alternatively an in-house seamless payment service can be developed
using a raw credit-card merchant account. The benefit of an
in-house seamless payment service is that the user is not transferred to
another website to make their payment. It all happens within your
own branded space.
This requires an SSL (secure socket layer).
An SSL is a certificate that is bound to a website, and encrypts
information that is sent and received.
The cost efficient option
for small companies it to use a service like PayPal or WorldPay.
PayPal, for example, has no annual charge and no inactivity fee, and can
be easily integrated into a PHP or ASP.NET website without the need for
an SSL.
Sharing data over the Internet
Applications can use the World Wide Web to transfer data, giving an application a global scope of operation.
For example,
a company with workshops in Berlin and an accounts department in Guildford can use the Internet as their own private network so that the engineers and the accounts both have access to a single shared database.
Because the Internet is a public network, there are security design rules that must be
considered during development of the Internet application to ensure that the data being transmitted is not read by a stranger, or tampered with in transit.
The diagram below shows the path of data between the database store and the application. SQL is the language used to communicate with a database server. XML is a markup language used to format data, SOAP is a special type of XML,
and XML is a way of formatting data.
Contact form
Use the contact form to send comments and requests for information to Broccoli Products.
