GORGES CEO Chris Grant meets with Congressman Hinchey

When the Congressman asked me about GORGES, I let him know about our rapid business growth over the last 5 years, primarily due to our innovation in Internet technologies, and our ability to help our customers businesses grow.

I also mentioned that we are actively keeping software development work from heading to offshore development companies, as our expert developers, low cost of living, and proven processes compete very well on the global market.  While our hourly rates may be higher than India, for example, our total cost to complete a project is often lower.

There are many reasons for this, foremost among them dedicated project management, a willingness to understand our clients’ business needs to create the right-fitting solution, as well as in-house experienced web developers and designers.

After hearing this, the Congressman remarked ‘Now this is the kind of company that America needs to create jobs and move this economy along’.

Just what we were thinking….

Frameworks generally belong to one of two camps, “pure frameworks” and “full stack frameworks”.

Most frameworks don’t make a distinction between “framework” and “application” features, and as a result they become cluttered. They also become more daunting to newcomers, with their sheer volume of classes that attempt to solve every practical problem a web developer might ever encounter – user management, document and image handling, upload and downloading, etc.

My favorite PHP framework, Yii, is a pure framework – free from the burden that many frameworks drag around, namely a full “application stack”. Yii consists almost exclusively of components and features designed to support certain practices or paradigms.

One of my favorite things about Yii, as compared to “full stack” frameworks, such as Zend, is that Yii only comes with components and architecture that can be rightfully said to belong in the “framework” domain, and not the “application” domain.

Of course, it may be hard in some cases to draw an exact line between the two, and I think the first criteria for selecting features that belong in the framework, and not in an application stack, should be:

• Is it absolutely general-purpose?
• If not, is it fully extensible?

Certain features, like the URL manager or Active Record, are not absolutely general purpose, in the sense that they may not satisfy every possible need anyone could ever have. But they are sufficiently general purpose in the sense that almost everybody is going to need at least the core functionality of those components. And because they are fully extensible, developers can build on top of them, rather than having to replace them, if they find that a component does not fully cater to their specific needs.

The reason why I do not want application features in a framework, is because I know from experience that these will not meet my strict requirements. I will eventually end up replacing many of these features and the existing features provided by the framework are reduced to baggage.

Everybody is different – we all have different goals, and even if we share some goals, we usually have different means for reaching those goals.

I believe the reason why we web developers converge around a framework, is because we agree on certain practices. The framework is designed to leverage those practices in a convenient and streamlined way.

The subtle art of the framework is to achieve accepted practice, without getting in the way of individuality – to enable us to adhere to the good practices that we agree upon, while still allowing us to be as different, as versatile and as colorful as we can!

In short, frameworks enable us to focus our efforts on “business logic”, the functionality that has real value to the website users. Thanks to the framework, we can focus on the practical requirements, without sacrificing the values that professional software developers care about: clean, maintainable and extensible code.

With a good framework, we can deliver value and high code quality, without charging extra for quality!

Part of creating “smart” web applications is understanding the semantics of what people type in, which implies using natural language processing.  Natural language processing software examines unstructured documents, and generates structured metadata that computers can handle.

Our application needed to understand phrases that people enter into a web browser.  We found three different approaches to handling this unstructured text:

SaaS APIs

These are hosted applications. All offer limited services at no charge, commercial services are generally pretty expensive. The major players appear to be:

Zemanta: offers an API with automatic tagging, among many other features.

OpenCalais: while it is by no means “open”, this API is powered by Reuters – which means that their “corpus” (body of words understood by the system) was composed using one of the world’s largest and most accurate volumes of text.

Alchemy API: offers automated categorization, tagging, keywords, etc.

NLP Toolkits

These are open-source toolkits (APIs that you can install on your own server) for analysis of unstructured text. Learning how to apply one of these might take a considerable effort – someone would have to learn at least the basics of NLP, to apply this software, or you might choose to hire a consultant with the the skills to develop this part of the application.

NLTK.org: a library written in Python, started in 2005, has been slowly creeping towards release 1.0 for the past year or so. While relatively young, it may be based on newer research than some of the more mature NLP libraries. Many corpora, grammar collections and trained models ready to use.

GATE: General Architecture for Text Engineering. Stable and proven toolkit for Java – this project started in 1995. Countless subprojects leverage this toolkit for various purposes.

FreeLing: Widely used toolkit in C++, with APIs for Java, PERL and Python. Online demos of this library demonstrate graphically how a short sentence can be broken down to a kind of tree-structure (nested subject/object, verb/adverb, etc.)

These are just a few examples – there are so many toolkits, and applications using these toolkits, that it would be impossible to make a choice based on a superficial analysis. To make a qualified choice, we would need to study at least the basics, or we would need the help of someone who knows enough about it to make a recommendation based on our needs.

Roll-your-own

Using e.g. MySQL, the Porter stemmer, a stop-word list and various other techniques to roll a basic search engine. Perhaps throw in a Bayesian text similarity measurement, to help rank the results and create stronger/weaker links between tables of keywords and posts.

It’s not NLP, and it’s not “web 3.0″, or “the semantic web” that everyone is buzzing about these days – because it does not understand semantics, and this will not yield the same kind of results – NLP systems “understand” unstructured text, where words like “not” and “really” can reverse or amplify the meaning of a subject – whereas anything you can roll on your own would most likely just recognize and consider these words “stop words” (ignoring them).

Answer:  When you have to improve the performance.

Of course writing bad or inefficient code is not a good way to develop code.  But spending time optimizing code before you know there is a problem can be a waste of time.  I value legible and readable code over unnecessarily-optimized code anyday.

If a web page or certain feature is too slow, then diagnosing exactly where to optimize is appropriate.  Here are some things to consider and test:

Is the bottleneck in the code or within a database call?

Perhaps the database needs to be indexed or normalized.

How many SQL calls are being performed?

Caching the database calls may solve this issue.

Is a database the best solution for storing all your information?

LDAP or memcache are two other options that may work best depending on what you are trying to do.

Are your files and images just too big?

Be sure the images are appropriately compressed, and that server-side compression for text files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML) is activated.

Could any of the heavy logic code be pre-computed?

I recall one project (Straight Line Performance Solutions) where I pre-computed a big table of possible values from a complicated statistical function, and just looked up an approximate number quickly instead of spending 5-10 seconds computing the exact value.

Are you using a bloated CMS (content management system)?

If you are and the web pages are static, then a page-caching system will work wonders.

Is the server limited by bandwidth, RAM, or CPU?

Monitor server performance indicators to see if  there is too much disk thrashing.  Hardware is relatively cheap nowadays, and may be a better solution than spending days unsuccessfully tweaking code.

Does the page feel like it loads fast enough?

Perception is everything to a web user.  Some non-essential web page items could be changed to load a few seconds after the visible part of the web page is loaded and refreshed.  For example, there’s no reason to preload all images in a Javascript-based slide show.

Is there just too much traffic to your site?

Wow – what a great problem to have!  Maybe it’s time to scale your web application to multiple servers or host your application in the cloud.  There are sometimes session-management issues when using multiple web servers, but some real smart folks have figured most of this out for the major languages and popular frameworks.

There are only some ideas of what to look for – and I’m sure I missed a bunch of simple ones.  As you can see, I recommend spending time diagnosing the real problem before jumping in and optimizing code right away.

I’d rather have a correct program than a fast incorrect one.  Optimizing code when needed is better than having to debug faulty code.

One of keys to success on the web is developing strategies to convert casual visitors to lifetime customers.  There are many simple tools that can help transform your static online presence into a dynamic and living entity that visitors return to again and again.

CORPORATE BLOG
Your business is always growing – changing as you adapt to new clients, customers, and opportunities.  Those changes are something worth talking about!  A corporate blog is an easy way to show your visitors that your business is alive and thriving.  Furthermore, using email notification and RSS, you can easily broadcast your news to a community of readers who care.

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
Once you make a sale or finish a client’s project, your business moves on and without some effort, your customer/client may soon forget the details of their experiences with you.  Regular email newsletters are an invaluable way to keep in touch with your customers, clients, and colleagues and inform them of the most recent projects, products, and/or people in your organization.  You can even build the subscription process right into your website with a simple subscribe form.

These tools offer a powerful way to keep people aware of your business.  Even if there are no known future sales opportunities, they can help generate a buzz and build your brand through word of mouth.  At Gorges Web Sites, we’re passionate about finding ways to use the web to help grow your business!  There is a wealth of options and opportunities available and we’re excited to help develop and execute the right strategies for you.

First, what is agile development?  Agile development is a set of methodologies for creating software.  These methodologies include breaking projects into smaller tasks with minimal long-term planning.  Each task, or iteration, is treated at a mini-project with planning, design, coding, and testing cycles.  Collaboration is encouraged among team members, and face-to-face communication is prefered to written documentation.  The customer is expected to be available to make decisions on design, features, and prioritizing tasks.

The proclaimed benefits are faster development and higher customer satisfaction.

So why don’t we promote agile development on our web site?

We have found that it takes a certain type of client to make agile development work.  The client must be actively involved, willing to make quick decisions and not be adverse to compromise if we learn that certain features may be costly to implement.  The smaller cycles are called “sprints” and since the deadlines are fixed, decisions are continually made to prioritize the features and tasks to meet these deadlines.

Likewise this sort of development can be a challenge to developers who are used to fixed specifications and planning the entire project before starting programming.

Gorges has had some marvelous agile-development successes, but we have also learned to not push this style onto our customers.  Another reason we do not promote this methodology is that it is difficult to estimate the project size since the development is dependent upon the client’s feature selections.