First and foremost, the technologies employed by Computer Consulting Wizards are constantly being evaluated to ensure that they are still the best way to provide the most productive customer solutions. There are a vast array of options in doing just about anything connected with computers these days, advocated by a host of different companies and groups.

Even during as short a period as the past five years, many software development fads have come and gone. Countless thousands of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of these fads, often resulting in less than complete customer satisfaction, primarily due to a lack of significant performance improvement. While we are enthusiastic about finding new ways to perform the different aspects of our jobs, we prefer not to do it with mission critical applications. Predetermined development plans (it’s gotta be a …) are usually not a good idea, and we prefer to have the flexibility to consider several options in order to find the best one.

DATABASES: As a general principle, we believe that all but the smallest of websites should have an underlying database to manage the website content and ensure the integrity of any data that is gathered. This leads to the lowest overall costs for content management and website maintenance, with only a modest increase in initial development cost. The advent of free open source database software has made this possible, and new entrants have given us more options than ever. The MySQL database server is our current default database option, but we have a great deal of experience with Microsoft SQL Server, Access and other database systems.

OPERATING SYSTEMS: Microsoft Windows/DOS (All Server and Workstation Versions) and Linux

PROGRAMMING AND SCRIPTING LANGUAGES: When creating Internet or Intranet applications we prefer to use PHP for server-side scripting of features and security. We make limited use of Javascript, but since it is turned off in many cases, we don’t emphasize its use. Frequently, as in the Microsoft Office suite, the language, such as Visual Basic for Applications, is provided. Other languages are evaluated and applied to fit the requirements of a given application. We have a great deal of experience in developing with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, Adobe’s Cold Fusion, and other common languages and tools.

WEB STANDARDS: Our preference would be to always adhere to the established standards for HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and other relevant standards, were it not for the uneven implementation by the browser developers. The addition of XML and the related XHTML standard has the industry firmly in a “Transitional” mode, but hopefully in the future we will see more compliance and consensus among the parties involved.