Technologies
Blue Fountain has experience with a broad range of different technologies from both closed and open source backgrounds. Historically we have worked with companies such as Novell, Lotus, IBM and Microsoft however in 2000 we reviewed all the many technologies we worked with and made the decision to concentrate on Open Source solutions with a particular focus on the following.
If you know about Open Source software you'll have heard about Linux. Ninety nine per cent of our solutions are deployed using Linux as a reliable, secure cost effective bedrock. However our core technologies are platform independent and we also develop and deploy for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh OS X when required.
Used in such organisations as Google and NASA, Python is not rocket science. It's a dynamic object oriented programming language which is useful for developing a wide range of applications. We use it extensively for controlling time critical and processor intensive tasks in the enterprise and it is also the core of the Zope application server.
Complex but amazingly powerful, Zope is a very mature and popular application server. Flexibility is one of the key words when you think of Zope - if you have a requirement it's very likely that Zope has a solution for it already. We have deployed many RDBMS backed systems using Zope but currently we use it mostly in association with Plone.
A content management system written on top of Zope, Plone has won many awards and is used by such diverse outfits as Ebay, Lufthansa and Oxfam.
Another Open Source programming language similar to Python but with it's own particular strengths. We use Ruby in conjunction with Ruby on Rails and increasingly for standalone programming tasks where the situations permit.
Ruby on Rails is the current 'big thing' in the web application development world. If you can cut through the hype and bias you'll find that Rails is a wonderfully efficient way of creating database backed websites (and for doing more besides). All our database backed work is now written using Rails.
"The world's most advanced open source database" is how the PostgreSQL website describes it and that is exactly what we have found. Postgres is our database backend of choice having proven itself to us repeatedly with the range of features it provides and the stability it gives our applications.
Of course, any technology company does not work in a vacuum and we frequently need to deal with other tools and solutions. An extensive list would take too long to write but as a sample we have provided solutions in the last twelve months which include MySQL, PHP, OpenLDAP, Exim, Postfix, FreeS/WAN, Samba, Spam Assassin, Cyrus, BIND, Apache and many many more. We never stop looking and learning.
