APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
BLACKSTONE are highly experienced in compatibility techniques and progressive enhancement, which enables us to safely utilize new technology.
While we are passionate about following cutting-edge technologies, we are realistic about their business viability - so we conduct regular evaluations for suitability in real business-grade applications including support, community and life expectancy.
BLACKSTONE Digital Agency are experts at application development - that goes without saying, but often it’s all that is said. That and a lot of boilerplate; boardroom bingo; over-produced; over-generalized descriptions of a company's application development capabilities. Which to a technical director is blah, blah, blah - so, what do we really do?
BLACKSTONE create business-critical applications from a user-centered design perspective and employing contemporary architectural patterns. And the appropriate separation of concerns allows for the continual extension of your core business processes into emerging technologies on web, desktop, mobile and tablet platforms. From analysis and architecture through to design, coding, testing and deployment, we provide expertise at all levels of application design including database design, business logic, integration, UX and UI.
And if you’re looking for acronyms, we use languages including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Objective C, SASS/LESS, ActionScript3, ExpressionBlend, Java building on top of platforms including .NET, Zend, iOS, Apache/IIS and Mono.
Our development time is bootstrapped using frameworks including JQuery, Microsoft MVC, WCF, WPF, CodeIgniter, Flash/Flex, PureMVC, Modernizr and Masonry/960.
We utilize unit testing and deployment systems including PHPUnit, NUnit, Adobe Shadow, Team City and Phing to provide Q/A confidence and automation. Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive and we constantly update our skills in relation to new technologies. And while we are passionate about following cutting-edge technologies, we are realistic about their business viability – so we conduct regular evaluations of new, exciting yet contentious technologies such as Silverlight, Node.js, NoSQL and cloud computing, for their suitability in real business-grade applications including support, community and life expectancy. Meaning you can be confident that when we recommend a business technology choice, it’s based on merit rather than hype.
We also believe that occasionally it’s worth pushing the boat out - even when the technology hasn’t quite yet landed. We are highly experienced in backwards and forwards compatibility techniques, graceful degradation and progressive enhancement, which enables us to safely utilize new technology even before browser support has reached 100%.