Web site Design & Development - Sydney, Australia

Technical Overview

Introduction

macdaddy PTY LTD is committed to delivering high quality websites and services, using detailed analysis, emerging technologies and industry standards with short development cycles.

A part of macdaddy's strategy was to develop our own server framework. The main aims are:

re-usability of code – fast development of websites
modularity – full customization according to client's requirements
permanent development – constantly improving feature quality
platform and database engine independence – variability = low hosting cost
using Open Source solutions – under permanent development outside of macdaddy
security

copilot [CSM] is a php framework based on a 3 tier application model. Three-tier is a client-server architecture in which the user interface, functional process logic and data storage are developed and maintained as independent modules. The result is framework and database engine that remain independent and communication between the application and presentation layers are extremely flexible and support many Internet standards including hand held communication devices. This means that the front-end (client-side) can use HTML, CSS, JS, Macromedia Flash or SVG on the same back-end (server-side engine).

Used technologies

PHP

Application layer is written in PHP 5. (PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development).
more info:
www.php.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php

AdoDb

ADOdb is a database abstraction library for PHP. It allows developers to write applications in a fairly consistent way regardless of the underlying database storing the information. The advantage is that the database can be changed without re-writing every call to it in the application. Currently AdoDb supports more then popular 16 database engines plus all ODBC and ODBTP database systems (list of supported databases - http://phplens.com/adodb/supported.databases.html)
more info:
http://adodb.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADOdb

SMARTY Template Engine

It provides the programmer and template designer with a wealth of tools to automate tasks commonly dealt with at the presentation layer of an application. Web page designers are not dealing with PHP code syntax, but instead an easy-to-use templating syntax not much different than plain HTML. The templates are a very close representation of the final output, dramatically shortening the design cycle.
more info: http://smarty.php.net

XAJAX

Xajax is an open source PHP class library that allows you to easily create powerful, web-based, Ajax applications. Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to shift a great deal of interaction to the Web surfer's computer, exchanging data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. We use XML to exchange data between phpCore and Flash front-end applications.

Apache

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. The November 2005 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that more than 70% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined.
more info: http://www.apache.org