When you say cutting-edge, it means a device, technique or technology is at its highest level of development. Hilsoft Inc. and other companies in the tech industry use this term to highlight their innovations.
The word cutting-edge has been used in the fields of software, networking, robotics and AI. But what really is the practical use of these cutting-edge technologies? In business, what’s in it for them?
A typical business application, its features, and benefits, by itself should be cutting edge–from user interface to user experience. But the underlying technologies within that business application should also be considered in determining how cutting-edge it is.
Some examples are the database it’s running on, the application server, the application platform, the concurrency capabilities, security, development libraries, speed, and performance.
As a software company, Hilsoft Inc. does experiments on which is the most applicable technology for our products and it is a difficult decision to make. We have to consider its competitiveness in the market.
Some examples are: What development language to use. Should we use Java or .Net? PHP or Ruby on Rails For a framework, should we use MVC? Spring boot? EJB or Struts? For eCommerce, is it proprietary, Drupal or WordPress? For the database, should we design it in an open database? Should we try NoSQL for faster performance such as Cassandra or MongoDB?
For the front end, there are so many platforms that were forked from JavaScript like JQuery, React, NodeJs, etc. Should we go native mobile app, multi-platform or browser-based? And there are more like, IDE, compilers, etc.
Then the question of how soon should we try and experiment on the future trends such as AI, AR and the fancy term quantum teleportation rise?
So many options and all claiming to be the best.
For Hilsoft, our latest product developments are a travel platform and Snap accounting. We set some criteria to determine which platform and framework to use for them.
1. Concurrency — we use Java Spring Boot with Synchronous and Asynchronous methods.
2. Volume — we use PostgreSQL in development but it is designed for any database with JDBC capabilities. At the moment, we are playing around with NoSQL like Cassandra.
3. Maturity — we ensure that the technology we are employing is matured and supported by the global community if not, already a de facto standard.
4. Security — we are mindful of the OWASP standards and we ensure all aspects of security are attended during development.
5. Rapid Application — we believe that a timely release of our product features and the convenience of our programmers are considered in choosing the right development language or platform. We are minimalist in the field of software development. We choose low-level platforms for flexibility with few but strong features.
What’s in store for the future of Hilsoft? The company has an R&D committee that regularly brainstorms about product improvements. In the pipeline are AI for capturing receipts, SAAS-based business intelligence, and some innovative service offerings with the use of cutting-edge technologies.