Applications

At 4th Dimension Development we love web applications. In fact we like web development so much that we are constantly creating our own applications. Some of these are experiments, some are for side ventures, and others are to help our client relationships. When we find time away from client projects we will add some of our experiments here.

Upcoming Releases & Activities

We are excited to be building a web site and project management application using the latest version of Expression Engine. This CMS is based on the popular CodeIgniter MVC framework for PHP. EE 2 is very user friendly for our customers, has a very well-defined application structure, and has powerful features beyond many CMS’. We are also integrating Flex elements to make compact, feature rich applications for the site.

4th Dimension Development is also currently building a Flex and CodeIgniter media rich site. The performance we are witnessing using AMF to communicate between Flex and CodeIgniter is excellent, much faster than using JSON or XML. By using Flex and an PHP MVC framework, we can build very modular, and extensible applications quickly.

Wes is currently a technical reviewer for a new edition of an Apress book on advanced PHP practices. “PHP Objects Patterns, and Practices” is a great read and covers some best practices when developing using PHP. Every PHP developer who wishes to move into more advanced techniques and go from being a mediocre developer to an artisan will benefit from this book.

iPhone Web Application

4th Dimension Development is currently working on a web application targeting the iPhone/iPod Touch. This application enables a user community to add content through our online interface using their mobile devices. The content can then be pushed to a native iPhone application to the benefit of the user community. Our goal is to create a web application that could be accessible to first a selected user group and then expanded to a broad audience. By targeting the iPhone specifically we can tie together the user experience from using the native application with the web application. Because we use best practices like the MVC pattern, we will be able to create other interfaces as well without duplicating much effort.

The tools we are using:

  • Adobe Fireworks to create the wire frames and layouts for our work flows.
  • Adobe Photoshop for the graphical assets of our application.
  • CodeIgniter PHP framework for rapidly creating a robust application that can easily be reused for other client view technologies and devices.
  • jQuery & JavaScript – We use jQuery to easily add visual effects and handle any AJAX calls. Where appropriate we use custom JavaScript to optimize our application.
  • MySQL database to hold our data.