New Project

Time to start a new project.

This one, without giving too much away, is a large scale project, for medium to ‘semi’-large enterprises.

It will be web based, allowing for a large number of simultaneous users, as well as being driven by an SQL database.

Having a number of certifications and qualifications in various languages, I have the opportunity to choose my development stream.

Firstly, I considered using Xojo, but the problem there is that my licence for Xojo has expired and as I am now using macOS Catalina, I can no longer use 32 bit applications. I also don’t really want to pay for the licence when there are free options available, so it is time for me to move on.

Next, we have PHP. I have a lot of experience with PHP and have developed a large number of web sites and applications using it. However, being a scripted language, it has inherent problems, primarily speed and the potential for vulnerabilities. On the plus side, PHP has a very large community and a vast number of libraries to call upon, but, it does need a web server and runtime to be deployed, before deploying the application.

My day job requires me to develop software written in dotnet, or more specifically, C#. This would fix the speed issue (to a point), and, if I use dotnet core, I wouldn’t need to pre-deploy a web server. Through my day job, I do have a certification from Microsoft for developing applications in C#, but there are a number of issues, primarily speed and the need to deploy the dotnet runtime, which is quite large, on the target system.

Each of the options mentioned above are available on all of the three main platforms: Windows, Linux and macOS. The next option is not available on Windows, which is why I have rejected this one also. Swift is known for being the primary language for creating iOS and macOS software, however, as it is now open source, it is just as easy to use it for Linux, and with some jiggery-pokery, Windows (but this is not straight forward). There are three main frameworks for creating web applications with Swift, but it feels like a bolt on, rather than a native solution.

This brings me to the final, and selected, solution: Go. I recently completed a course in development with Go, which doesn’t make me anything like an expert, but I feel I have enough understanding of the core syntax and key concepts to be able to utilise it for a production project. Go produces native binaries, so no runtimes required. No web server is required either as, like dotnet core, the product is an application that acts as the server as well. Finally, Go, being a new language, is designed for multi-core systems, this means that concurrent programming is the norm for it (Rust is similar in that respect, but I prefer the syntax of Go). On the down side, it is not a strictly object oriented language (although some would argue that the syntax allows for a form of OOP). This means that I need to learn ta new way to design and develop he software.

The first task at hand is to convert my database ORM package. About a year ago, I wrote a library for C#, called DaggerTech.Data which divorces nearly all of the database functionality from your application code, allowing you to focus on the application. The library was designed for use with Microsoft SQL Server.

I have also ported DaggerTech.Data to PHP, although this one is designed for MySQL and MariaDB.

For this project, I will be using Postgres as the database. I want to keep the costs to the customers down, so by using a truly open source database, it ticks all the boxes. SO it does mean that I need to rewrite DaggerTech.Data in Go (currently codenamed GoDagger), which is a bit of a challenge as the original was completely object oriented and it uses reflection to provide the functionality, but the documentation for Go is very comprehensive, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

Anyway, just an update to let you know what I’m up to these days. I will keep you updated with developments.