by

Developer's View

January 24, 2001

Joe Duncan is responsible for Business Developments at E-Solutions, Auckland, New Zealand. Bruce Trevarthen is the company's Technical Director and responsible for Business Developments at E-Solutions, Wellington. Clients include www.beautydirect.co.nz, www.smokecds.com, and the application framework behind www.fetch.co.nz.

The Work

Joe: E-Solutions has two focuses - providing a Web interface and doing integration work. Everything from Web site design at the simple end to communicating with legacy systems. We focus on the customised market and developing solutions from scratch. There are real benefits in creating a Web interface and making reporting or administration transparent to everybody within an organization. It brings together employees, suppliers and associates.

Our speciality is the back end. We have a good cross section of language expertise and middleware experience - things like ASP and Cold Fusion. We also have sections devoted to graphics and multimedia . A lot of Web development companies grew from front to back, starting as design houses then moving into back-end technologies. We've come from the other end of the spectrum, the language end, Cold Fusion, C++, VB, SQL, Oracle, Sybase - functionality first, pretty pictures second.

Legacy Solutions

Bruce: It's interesting area because it tends to be more challenging. On the Internet there's a lot of brochureware - Web sites that present companies as brochures. But things have changed and if you're going to have a Web site nowadays, it needs to achieve something. It needs to be integrated with your systems, so as a company you can allow visitors to your site to do business with you over the Web without having to ring up. That means more interactivity, more of an online application than a straightforward Web site.

We're using Web technologies to port information that goes in and out of original information systems and give it a Web front, so people can use the Internet to access systems and submit or retrieve information.

The idea of companies using the same systems internally that they allow their customers to access through the Web is becoming more commonplace. You'll find big companies with helpdesks are providing Web based systems allowing customers to help themselves, from fault resolution to order tracking. They tend to take that same information, modify it slightly and create an intranet out of it, then give it to call centre staff. So call centre staff have the same information that customers have, and over the same interface.

Joe: Many organizations have a lot of systems. With the Web you must have a primary source of data. The interface has to be with the primary source. A company may look at Web-enabling their systems, but it can mean ground level restructuring of the systems they have currently. They may have to redevelop their Management Information System and use that as their primary source, or possibly a different system.

Organizations call in a consultant and ask, "Where do I start?" And the starting point often has to be internal, maybe developing an application that brings all the key information into one place. The other alternative is to make systems talk to each other. It depends on the IT structure of the organization.

XML for Legacy?

Bruce: It's only recently that XML has become an issue in legacy interfacing. It hasn't been a requirement so far because infrastructure - computer systems and databases - is usually in-house, within the client company. That means you're not transferring data all over the place. You can treat Web applications the same way as you would a Windows application in Visual Basic, and talk to databases the same way. Any intelligence you need at the browser end can be dealt with in JavaScript or Java, and you can use SQL on the server with Cold Fusion or ASP. That's why XML hasn't been in great demand. It's only when you start transferring data across different platforms, or need a common data structure to deliver information to multiple interfaces, that it becomes important.

Software Gems

Bruce: Cold Fusion is our favourite. It's the language we prefer to live and breathe. There are two main reasons. A lot of the work we do is initial concept, and then commercialised later, so speed to market is crucial. Developing in Cold Fusion helps cut down development time and costs.

We do use ASP too, on occasions, but there's a lot more code. Whatever you can do in ASP you can usually achieve in Cold Fusion.

Over the last six months, we found that more hosting farms are bolting Cold Fusion and SQL on to their Web space as supported features. Six months ago you had to go to the States, but now you can find support here in New Zealand, so we can push it a little more.

For HTML we use Cold Fusion Studio - an advanced version of Homesite. We don't use WYSIWIG editors because of the extra code they generate. Page size is crucial.

New Zealand Culture

Joe: The Web uptake from a consumer point of view is very good in New Zealand. There are two main issues that probably apply anywhere. One is payment methods, the other is security.

New Zealand has some infrastructure issues. I'm not sure that we have the best connectivity. You could easily put a fibre around a place like Hong Kong, but here we have a widely-spaced rural community. Geography is a contributing factor.

Bruce: G3 could be a solution, but latency is a problem over radio. We'll have to wait to see if it works. Nokia are talking about 2 megabit video-conferencing over a cell phone, but in reality that's still a few years away.

Joe: We'd like to see everybody having high quality access, then they'll use it more.

Bruce: On the business side, our clients usually aim at the local market for phase one, and then maybe aim for Australia, the UK, and the rest of the world. Sometimes we look at the statistics and find that a company is getting more international orders than New Zealand orders. At that point the client may rethink their approach and aim for the offshore market.

Joe: Some countries use lot of .com names locally, but here we're more likely to use .co.nz domains. One reason is that DomainsNZ, the domain company for New Zealand, has done a good job promoting .co.nz. It's also a lot more complicated to register a .com here.

Future

Joe: We're very much at the beginning. It's very difficult to predict how things will be in ten years' time. I can see convergence of media channels, including the TV, especially in the residential market. There's a real benefit in being able to provide this kind of stuff as interactive TV. Everyone is familiar with the TV, it just needs the addition of a keyboard. It can be done now, but isn't mainstream yet. The Internet could finish up with two components, or even three. It might divide itself into layers, for example business and recreational.

Bruce: People are familiar with flicking from movies to sport on TV. The Internet, by comparison, is a very fragmented information space. A segmented system might be easier to use.

Joe: There are so many components that influence the delivery of the Net. You've got the PC or TV or wireless device that reads the page. There's the infrastructure that delivers it, plus servers in the background, and finally the technology on those servers. Because there are so many components, change takes time. One element might be outstripping the other. Clearly there's a lot that server technology can do, but then maybe the infrastructure of 56k modems isn't up to delivering it. Streaming video, for example. Investment has to be made in all of the components for us to really see a change.

Pet Hates

Joe: I think we'd both agree on Frames. Though having said that, we're building a framed site at the moment. Sometimes it is the best solution, it's just overused.

Advice for New Developers

Bruce: You have to know HTML, no matter what you're going to do, even sales. It's now a prerequisite. Then play with some languages and see which ones appeal. You need to be interested in a code if you're going to learn it. Then use it for real. SQL, ASP and Cold Fusion are languages I'd recommend as a starting point.