Isotoma Limited

Twisted is one of our favorite pieces of technology. We’ve used it in Sleevenotez, and we had a major project last year, that was unfortunately canned for budget reasons after we’d done about 2 months modelling and spec work, that we designed in Twisted. I’ve been using it for years and I really think it’s one of the finest software systems I’ve ever come across. Coincidentally, I spent all weekend hacking on a prototype in Twisted (integrating twisted.web2.dav with Oracle’s dbxml,. since you ask).

So it’s nice to see it’s qualities being recognised in one of the more difficult parts of the industry. I think we really are on the cusp of dynamic languages taking their place at the enterprise table alongside Java and .NET. This can only benefit the ecosystem itself — the competition between Java and .NET has often been a competition in featureitis, with sales made to senior IT folk on the basis of checklists of more or less unnecessary features. Hopefully a voice calling for simplicity will help introduce some common sense.

Posted by Doug Winter at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you may remember, we launched MapMyAdventure in February for STA Travel. The application was written in PHP and Javascript. We’d inherited it from another development team, hence the PHP, which obviously isn’t a technology we’d generally choose to use.

The application required some significant enhancements to the back end CMS (which you can’t see as a user), and we took the decision to rebuild the entire server component in TurboGears. This worked out really well, with over 15,000 lines of PHP rewritten as around 5,000 lines of Python, including unit tests, in a few weeks. It was a pretty painless process, with a much more stable and flexible codebase in place. We left the Javascript largely untouched.

I’ll namecheck some of the other components too, all of which did a great job: SQLAlchemy, Elixir, Genshi, lxml, geopy and our own TGNewTraversal.

In the process we added a bunch of back end features, and made a few changes to the front end. The important thing is that we’ve now got a stable platform to extend and enhance, and to roll out for new countries. Watch this space, this is a really exciting project and I think it’s going to go a long way.

Posted by Doug Winter at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We're recruiting again... We've got 2 positions open at the moment, both of which are described over on the jobs page of the main site. If you, or anyone you know, are interested please give us a shout ASAP. We've got some exciting new projects just starting and a couple in the pipeline.... Join us!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)