What We Do
Our principal value is in our experience and our ability to get things done. We work in a consulting role or as contractors. While we specialize in web-based application development using J2EE and the Jakarta-Struts framework, we also have considerable experience in a wide range of other areas.
Extreme Programming
We are avid proponents of Extreme Programming (XP) and are therefore fanatical about unit tests and communication. XP is rapidly becoming the lightweight process of choice, especially for web development. XP and other agile processes emphasize the necessity of writing the unit tests first.
Ward Cunningham himself said to Mr. Tangney “You obviously get it” on the occasion of his signing of the Agile Manifesto. We have close ties to some of the leading XP coaching and training resources. (See Resources.) Mr. Tangney is a master of refactoring. He encountered and internalized almost all the Gang of Four patterns years before they had names.
Of course, XP is not ideal for every project. Ron Jeffries himself claims that he'd decline a flight in a plane if its avionics system was developed using XP.
Unified Process
For many years, we have used the various precursors of the Unified Process, including Jacobsen's Use Cases and the Schlaer-Mellor OOA Methodology. We routinely use UML to sketch design ideas (see Martin Fowler's bliki), having switched from OMT some years ago. But UML and UP are not synonymous. It's clear that "heavyweight" processes such as UP are of tremendous value in some areas but they are not ideal for every project.
Technologies, Tools and Frameworks
XML
We have used XML its various ancillary technologies (such as XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, SOAP, XML-RPC) on several projects, and are conversant with its risks and advantages. The tools we generally recommend are Xalan, Xerces, Castor, and the like, though we also have an interest in Cocoon and other technologies.
Java and OOP
Mr. Tangney is a Sun Certified Java Programmer, with 6 years of solid Java experience. Our Object Oriented experience stretches back some 16 years to the early days of Smalltalk. (Mr. Tangney contributed to the open source Siren project which is written entirely in Smalltalk.)
Working in the Java world, we are familiar with a wide range of Java technologies, including JDBC, JSP, JNDI, JAAS, JMF, Swing, and a many, many more. We use industry standard tools like JUnit, Tomcat, Ant, Hibernate, XDoclet, Eclipse, and a wide variety of others. We have also found tools like HtmlParser to be invaluable.
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