Technology
Boulder Technology creates proprietary, highly tailored systems infrastructure for its clients by combining reusable business software components from its own proprietary library with custom-developed product and service engines built exclusively for each client.
Functional Architecture
A typical client system provides web marketing and lead capture features through a software-driven website; customer service and service delivery functions through a client extranet; and a broad array of operational, business, and system management controls through a corporate intranet. Usually central to all these functions is complex product/service engine and an underlying CRM of client businesses and prospects.
Stitched together seamlessly, the finished assembly of general-purpose and tailored software components provides a robust foundation upon which Boulder Technology clients can operate their businesses and deliver their products and services with maximum efficiency and flexibility.
Some client systems are augmented by - occasionally even centered around - one or more mobile applications. Boulder Technology develops mobile application technology for both the iPhone and Android platforms.
Technical Architecture
Web-Based Systems
For web-based systems, Boulder Technology is a strong proponent of two core technologies:
- Adobe ColdFusion
- Ruby on Rails
Adobe ColdFusion Application Server
Built on top of Java/J2EE technologies and providing strong object-oriented component features, together with easily implemented front-end controls, ColdFusion strikes the perfect balance between a proven, stable architecture and the shortened time to market associated with rapid application development.
Boulder Technology has built its own in-house Model View Controller (MVC) framework in ColdFusion, enabling clear separation between the presentation, system control, and core business logic layers. Our systems also make use of the latest Javascript toolkits for providing rich user experiences on the front end, employing ExtJS, jQuery, and Prototype. All front-end code is delivered as standards-compliant XHTML for fast, clean rendering in any operating system and any browser. Since the right job requires the right tool, the Boulder Technology team employs several other technologies to bolster its core ColdFusion applications. Java classes and servlets provide a natural extension point, and open source Java libraries such as Spring and Hibernate provide strong, industry-standard features in a way that is easily integrated with ColdFusion. Similarly, Adobe Flex is employed to combine object-oriented strengths of the ActionScript language with the rapid-development nature of its declarative MXML syntax to generate rich user experiences in Flash. ColdFusion is a natural complement to Flex applications, providing the underlying services that power the Flash front-end.
Ruby on Rails
As with Boulder's ColdFusion framework, Ruby on Rails also uses the MVC architecture pattern to organize application programming.
Ruby on Rails includes tools that make common development tasks easier "out of the box", such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. WEBrick, a simple Ruby web server that is distributed with Ruby, and Rake, a build system, distributed as a gem, flesh out the basic development environment.
Ruby on Rails relies on a web server to run it. For purposes of technology standardization and because familiarity with it is so widely spread, Boulder prefers the Apache web server, running Phusion Passenger for easy Rails deployment. However, other servers such as Mongrel, WEBrick, Lighttpd, Abyss, and nginx can be used.
Ruby on Rails is noteworthy for its extensive use of the JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us for Ajax, and more recently jQuery, providing a good degree of cross-application compatibility with components developed by Boulder for its ColdFusion systems.
Since version 2.0, Ruby on Rails by default offers both HTML and XML as output formats. The latter is the facility for RESTful web services.
Database Environments
Boulder Technology's applications can operate against either of the leading commercial SQL databases (Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server), though most clients opt for a back-end based on the open source MySQL database environment. Platform operation relies upon the widely implemented open source Linux operating system and the Apache web server.
Mobile Applications
Boulder employs industry-standard tools for developing mobile applications.
iPhone applications are developed in Objective C using the Apple iOS Software Development Kit. Applications are built and debugged in Xcode, then distributed on an ad hoc basis to various stakeholders for testing and analysis, and finally submitted through the App Store for worldwide distribution.
Android applications are built using Google's Android SDK for Java, and submitted to the Android Market for distribution.
Though mobile applications invariably house some base amount of data locally within the mobile device, they primarily rely upon a proprietary, Boulder Technology-architected data services layer to exchange critical application information with a central web-based data repository. To ensure high performance even under low-bandwidth conditions, the lightweight Javascript Object Notation (JSON) format is used to send data from the server to the mobile device.