The pleasure to work in technology
When life starts to be boring it's time to make big changes and give people new challenges so, restored in mind and body after a lazy summer, we decided to increase our skills on cloud computing and distributed non-relational databases, and to include google applications in our internal groupware tools, to evolve our company and, as first, to review our collaborative tools in a "cloud key" to have a first-person view of the effects that these new technologies can have on a company.
Moreover, thanks also to the suggestion of a friend that told us "guys you do a LOT of interesting things, but nobody knows about them!" we understood it's the moment to change our attitude to communicate to customers and supporters, so we decided to resume sending the periodical newsletter and to update the website that was stuck since long time ago (yes, we spend most of time coding so we have no resources for all the rest), as our marketing friends says "if you don't communicate you don't exist!".
one more piece of news: our e-mail addresses have changed, we are moving from the old format "lastname@interlogica.it" to the new one "firstname.lastname@interlogica.it", we are keeping the old addresses alive for some months but, please, update your address books with the new ones.
Focus on software
on 21st of september we finally delivered on-line very very powerful new version ( the 3rd! ) of our platform for the fleet locating services called "Foxroute".
The V3 is a big evolution both from the software point of view because it's completelly divided in different layers (PHP, SOAP, DB) and from the commercial one because our partners are now enabled to interface external systems to the platform thru very powerfull Foxroute API, using it as an advanced webservice for the vehicle location data storage that provides real time informations to their own systems.
Last but not least, Foxroute V3 uses the Google Maps engine to provide an high quality cartographic real-time view of datas!
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Cloud Computing Storms In (and new apps rain down)
In the geeky darkness of our offices we are always at work, planning, building and installing new, complex applications for our customers - improving both our skills and their workflow in the process.
Recent Past
As many of you already know, for the last 4 years or so Streaming software (Web-TV backends, Video players, etc.) has kept us occupied, as developers for a very important, London-based commercial partner, Streaming Tank. Not many of you will be aware, however, that one of the main tools in our production of Streaming systems basically gives us the ability to deliver data by the terabyte per minute in every corner of the Earth, producing web sites capable of receiving hundreds of thousands of visits at a time; all this by utilizing well-known scripting and programming languages (e.g. PHP, Java), alongside much less familiar languages, like ESI, a common tool to program reverse proxy server.
Of course, a number of visitors as large as that requires a lot more than a single server, or even a hundred. Such a feat is made possible by specialized networks called CDN (Content Delivery Network). We went for the biggest: Akamai, composed by a fleet of over 45,000 dedicated servers.
Evolution
Over the last couple years a minor software revolution has been taking place, propelled by the apparently perpetual expansion and ramification of Web-based services: Cloud Computing, a fancy term that in layman's terms can be roughly, and perhaps inelegantly translated as "Your applications are no longer installed on your PC; They reside in the Internet". From a developer's point of view, however, Cloud Computing means mastering techniques and technologies to keep applications, and distribute data, over any network, spanning multiple servers, all the while guaranteeing their functionality and availability no matter what. An intriguing challenge for sure!
Those applications can fit any category; Office suits, specialized Web-Services, BI tools, or a modular combination of all the above.
What This All Comes To
With 4 years of experience of high availability data networks under our belt, and an even longer experience of web-based programming, I'm sure we have a head start in the world of Cloud. To put it into practice, we have already begun, by transforming our Tracking software, FoxRoute, into a Cloud application.
Stay tuned, folks: new skills are coming up!
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via Fusinato, 27 30171 Mestre (VE) Italy tel. +39.041.0993000 fax +39.041.0993049 p.iva 02849340274
