Development Practices & Skillset

General Steps in Web Application Development

Our quick development cycles and wide range of project scopes require a broad skillset. Within our current staff we do the majority of our development using the following languages and methods that meet the principles outlined in the UVU Enterprise Architecture Guide. We create custom integrations, process automation as well as full-stack development.

 

Agile - defines smart business and software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. We embrace a set of practices that emphasize the collaboration and communication of software developers and information technology (IT) professionals while automating software delivery and infrastructure changes. We aim to establish a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly and more reliably in a CI/CD environment.

 

Documentation - To ensure stability to the University and security for our clients, and as an operational standard, we document within our code and maintain documentation on systems built, services offered, involved resources, and dependent systems.

UVU API - offers an enterprise platform for integrating application programming interfaces (APIs), applications, and web services locally and across the Internet. The services and systems we build are created to ingest external data from APIs as well as expose data via APIs.

 

Front-End Web Technologies

HTML - is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web.

CSS - (Cascading Style Sheets) is a style sheet language used for the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written for the web.

JavaScript - is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content production; most websites employ it, and all modern Web browsers support it without the need for plug-ins.

Bootstrap - is an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-friendly websites. Before Bootstrap, developers used various libraries for interface development, which led to inconsistencies and a high maintenance burden.

jQuery - is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

VUE - (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. Vue is focused mainly on the view layer and is used in conjunction with PHP.

 

Back-End and Database Technologies

PHP - is a widely used and powerful scripting language designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. PHP interprets scripts on the server side (rather than client-side) allowing for secure validation of required data and processes. PHP is used in conjunction with JavaScript, Bootstrap, jQuery and VUE.

C#/.NET -  is an object-oriented, and type-safe programming language used for deep integration with Microsoft products where Microsoft Graph APIs are not yet available.

SQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle - are relational database management systems (RDBMS) that provide multi-user access to many databases. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language.

Azure SQL Database - is a managed database service that runs on the Microsoft Azure public cloud and access to it is provided as a service. The managed database services take care of scalability, backup, and high availability of the database.

MongoDB - is an open source NoSQL database. NoSQL is used as an alternative to traditional relational databases. NoSQL databases are quite useful for working with large sets of distributed data.

FSHPAL - (Foundation Systems High-Performance Application Language) is a back-end programming language and a NoSQL database system developed for high performance and high security. It is developed and supported localy and is primarily used in pharmacy operational software systems worldwide.

 

Development Environment

Visual Studio Code- is a source-code editor made by Microsoft that has been redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. 

GitLab - is an open source code repository for coding projects that offers online code storage and has capabilities for issue tracking and CI/CD. The repository enables hosting different development chains and versions, and allows users to inspect previous code and roll back to it in the event of unforeseen problems.

Docker Desktop - is an easy-to-install application for Mac or Windows environments that enables us the ability to containerize local development and share any application on any cloud platform and in multiple languages and frameworks.

 

Infrastructure

Azure Kubernetes Service -  (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service based on the open source Kubernetes system, which is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.  AKS is designed to build scalable applications with Docker and Kubernetes while using the Azure architecture.

Kubernetes -  For legacy systems we deploy to an on-premise instance of the open source Kubernetes system.