The remainder of this newsletter is written for the IT professional as an overview of our technology process and approach. Hopefully, we can answer some broad stroke questions to facilitate IT evaluation and work toward positive, trust-establishing communication with IT professionals.


One of the great things about IT guys is that they're so impatient. They cannot endure waste, and they despise inefficiency. So, in order to not waste one very important resource the IT guy's time), let me begin by quickly acknowledging a couple conditions that would not be a good fit for Newfangled's technology and approach.

Microsoft's IIS Web Server - Newfangled has deliberately chosen open source tools (the LAMP suite; Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). While we are very happy with our choice, we recognize that every technology has pluses and minuses, and technology choice is less important than a developer's skill in using the technology they've chosen. While our software is cross platform (I run my demos on a Windows laptop running XP), as far as our production hosting is concerned, we've limited our sphere to Linux/Apache. We typically provide high-end application hosting through our hosting partner RackSpace. However, if a site is to be hosted on a dedicated in-house server, we only support Linux/Apache. Window/ISS does work, but in order to keep from spreading ourselves too thin, we do not provide hosting support for anything but Linux/Apache. We've provided further detail of our hosting specifications in the FAQ section below.

Real time integration with internal client databases - Newfangled takes a very conservative and cautious position when real time integration with client databases is required. There are extremely important security issues when our web server and an in-house database must communicate across the internet. Additionally, the complexities involved in moving data between our database and an unfamiliar database calls for careful case-by-case consideration. We are more inclined to pursue batch data importing and exporting solutions rather than real time automated data transfer. That being said we do make exceptions, but by-and-large we steer away from such requirements.


Before I provide basic answers to a handful of technical FAQs I would like to highlight one frequently asked question from the IT guy. I am going to spend most of the remainder of this newsletter on this question because it underscores Newfangled's unusual web development philosophy and technological approach.   next >