Services
etonDIGITALME is a website consulting service provider that specializes in the design, development, implementation and marketing of Web 2.0 digital platforms to give businesses and individuals in the UAE and the Middle East the best chance to succeed on the Internet and regularly generate sales and business leads. We also offer our clients invaluable online consulting services and solutions based on many years of experience to help them achieve their objectives quickly and effectively.
Are you looking to rebrand yourself? Maybe increase your search engine rankings or create the next big thing on the internet? We can help you. Just say the word and we’re on the job.
We work closely with our clients, using our evolving rapid prototyping site development process (based on Rapid Application Development (RAD) process) to bring your vision to reality in a cost-effective manner.
We use a variety of OpenSource tools; Drupal (e.g. Media @ Yell.com, VansDirect – Drupal powered website for UK’s leading supplier of new vans and commercial, EEZEER : Social network and NOW reviews on airlines, aircraft photos & airline tweets, Concep and Premier French Property) WordPress and Open Source Web Application Frameworks such as symfony to build robust Social Networks (e.g. StoryVault, StudentBox , skipso) and Code Igniter to provide effective solutions to your business requirements.
Rapid Application Development (RAD)
The traditional software development cycle follows a rigid sequence of steps with a formal sign-off at the completion of each. Initially a detailed analysis is done that attempts to capture the system requirements in a Requirements Specification. Users are forced to “sign-off” on the specification before development proceeds to the next step. This is followed by a complete system design and then development and testing.
RAD is a methodology for compressing the analysis, design, build, and test phases into a series of short, iterative development cycles. This has a number of distinct advantages over the traditional sequential development model.
Programming web applications has long been a tedious and slow job. Following the usual software engineering life cycles (like the one proposed by the Rational Unified Process for instance), the development of web applications could not start before a complete set of requirements was written, a lot of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams were drawn, and considerable preliminary documentation was produced. This was due to the general speed of development, to the lack of versatility of programming languages (you had to build, compile, restart, and more before actually seeing your program run), and most of all, to the fact that clients didn’t often change their minds.
Today, business moves faster, and clients tend to change their minds more frequently over the course of a project’s development. Of course, they expect the development team to adapt to their needs and modify the structure of an application quickly. Fortunately, the use of scripting languages like Perl and PHP makes it easy to apply other programming strategies, such as rapid application development (RAD).
One of the ideas of these methodologies is to start developing as early as possible so that clients can review a working prototype and offer additional direction. The application then gets built in an iterative process, releasing increasingly feature-rich versions in short development cycles.
The advantages for the developer are numerous. A developer doesn’t need to factor in potential future changes when implementing a feature. The method used should be as simple and straightforward as possible. This is well illustrated by the maxim of the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
When the requirements evolve or when a feature is added, existing code usually has to be partly rewritten. This process is called refactoring, and happens a lot in the course of a web application development. Code is moved to other places according to its nature. Duplicated portions of code are re-factored to a single place, thus applying the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle.
And to make sure that the application still runs when it changes constantly, it needs a full set of unit tests that can be automated. If well written, unit tests are a solid way to ensure that nothing is broken by adding or refactoring code. Some development methodologies even stipulate writing tests before coding-that’s called test-driven development (TDD).
