Author: Mark Newton

Just before the Christmas season began in earnest I decided to try and move one of our Actinic shops to one of our new web servers, which, with hindsight, was probably not the best time to do such a thing. This web server was running windows 2003 web edition and IIS 6 so nothing particularly […]

When thinking about using new technology whether it be a new mobile phone or designing a new web site it is all too easy to get carried away with all the features that the product has or the web site could have. At this point stop! Don’t think what the technology will do, but rather […]

The ability to move back in your code is a first for web development I guess the big news for anyone developing with Microsoft technologies is the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4. Whilst I have mentioned these before, this was when the products were only beta. Now that release candidate as […]

Mapping has always held special fascination for me and from an early age I studied the large yellowing maps on the wall on the primary classroom. These graphical representations of the world showed a previous era, with a lot of the countries coloured in a pinkish red to indicate that they were part of the […]

With HTTPWatch you can see exactly what your web application is doing When writing code for a complicated web site or web application it can be difficult to see what exactly is going on, are the web services being called correctly? Are they returning the right results? Where the performance bottlenecks might be? The questions […]

Another development tool that has caught my eye is thanks very much to a colleague, DJ who I rate as one of the most knowledgeable Java developers that I know. The other day he was expounding the virtues of Java Net Beans IDE 5.5 with the Matisse interface builder. This free open source tool has […]

So, should we ignore Flash and Silverlight and wait for HTML 5 ? Well first thing to consider that whilst the spec for HTML5 is there, it has yet to reach a full standard and also the current browsers do not support it, so I think we have a little while to wait, but it […]

Currently I am developing a web application that will work on most mobile devices, this app takes data, filters and analysis it and then presents it to the mobile user in a form that they can use to help make a buying decision. The app calls a web service which interrogates a database of information, […]

I am currently engaged in the redesign of a couple of current web sites and when it comes to a redesign it is a good time to think about any new technologies that could be employed to improve the user experience as well as future-proofing the design against any new requirements from these users and […]