Research and Development

As technology enthusiasts, MEGTEK commit a significant amount of time and effort to research and development in addition to our core consultancy work.

We are particularly interested in enterprise-quality Open Source solutions, especially those that can work just as well for small and medium-sized businesses as they can for larger deployments.

Over the last few years, we've been working towards an open-source based platform capable of hosting enterprise Web applications, and are now at a stage where this is mature enough to host interactive web sites for our clients. Cornerstones of this architecture include Linux (our current preferred distribution is CentOS), Apache and JBoss used in conjunction with our own in-house Java software built using open-source libraries and frameworks such as Struts. Future work is likely to be focused on JSF (Java Server Faces) and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) which will provide a much richer and more responsive user experience, closer to a traditional desktop application than the limitations of a standard web page.

XML Databases

After having been impressed with the power of XML databases on client projects, MEGTEK have taken this one step further and have adopted the eXist open source XML database as the core back-end for our in-house web development projects. We have found the XML database paradigm to be ideally suited to interactive web applications, particularly when storing a mixture of textual and binary content (e.g. images) in a hierarchical structure - and this is especially powerful for the rapid prototyping and development of web applications.

Alchemy

"Alchemy" is the name that we have given to our bespoke modular Web architecture, which combines an eclectic mix of Open Source products with unique MEGTEK Java code. The idea behind Alchemy is to start with a custom-designed, standards-compliant website and add interactive functionality, such as an "admin" screen for administering the site and adding new content, or a shopping cart for an e-commece site. Depending on requirements, additional modules can be added as required - and with MEGTEK, the sky really is the limit, as we can design bespoke code to cater for virtually all customer needs and scenarios.