Custom Application Development

The majority of websites can be quickly built on existing software. Forums, wikis, CMS, jobs boards, shopping, dating, CRM, webmail.... all are available via sites such as Sourceforge. Quality is mixed and a degree of customization will almost certainly be needed, but there is a good chance that the basic framework of whatever you need has already been made, is freely available, well supported and of very high quality.

Sometimes the level of work required to fit existing software to your needs is excessive, the quality of existing software poor, or you are breaking new ground and making something almost or entirely new. In these cases you will need custom application development - building a website from the ground up.

Custom web application development can be surprisingly quick as there are increasingly sophisticated web frameworks that can speed the process by taking care of many of the time consuming tasks common to most websites. Custom development is therefore becoming faster and therefore less expensive. Just contact us to discuss your needs.

Case Study - Olive Jobs

Olive Net needed a jobs board but had a number of requirements that suggested custom application development rather than the extension of existing software. These included:

• Integration with community forums (jobs are automatically posted in to our forums)
• Allow a tiered pricing model (free for basic adverts then pricing depending on extra )
• Allow future extension to include training course advertising
• Allow company private pages

Solution

Olive Net studied existing jobs software then combined our own ideas and plans with the parts of existing jobs sites that we liked. The software development then began and over the course of 6 months followed these steps:

• Detailed requirements laid down. Who will use the system and which functions each user requires.
• Design of database schema and code architecture
• Screen designs and navigation model developed
• Base system implemented
• Templates ('look') developed and applied
• System testing
• Additional 'nice to have' functions and administrative controls implemented
• Payment integration implemented and tested
• Content added (T&Cs, privacy policy etc)

Olive Net use iterative development and an agile approach. The iterative element involves the building and testing of ever larger parts of the system, while agile development implies less reliance on planning and more on using the developing system and responding to feedback. As, once again, our own customers we were in the ideal position to do this, and Olive Jobs is still undergoing agile development.

Technology

Olive Jobs is built using one of the most powerful software frameworks available; Java Enterprise Edition (JEE). The use of JEE results in an extremely well structured, very flexible and secure system, although implementation would be slower than using dedicated rapid development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. Olive Jobs is pure Object Oriented, using EJB3 as a base for its business logic and Java ServerFaces (JSF) for its view and controller layers.

Olive Jobs makes use of the following technologies:

• MySQL
• EJB 3
• JSF/JSP/servlets
• Facelets
• MyFaces
• RichFaces

Results

Olive Jobs is very powerful and easily extensible software which exceeds its initial requirements and is undergoing continual development. Its strong Object Oriented modular architecture makes modification quick and stable.

The Olive Jobs design is clean and attractive and fully cross-browser and W3C compliant.

Unfortunately Olive Jobs was released just as the recession hit and the job market shrunk so commercially hasn't been as successful as hoped, but as a custom developed application with a limited budget, it is superb.