Seismic’s Application Development solutions provide organizations with the talent needed to determine the most suitable programming language for the task at hand. The choice of which programming language or combination of languages to use is subject to many considerations such as policy, suitability, availability of third party packages, security, time to deliver, and performance needs. Our engineers are experienced with a variety of open source/commercial off the shelf (COTS) products and have experience with the most prevalent programming languages including: Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, Ruby, and AJAX.

Seismic’s Application Development Solutions are centered on making sensible decisions with regards to which programming language to use. Take Java for instance, one of the most appealing characteristics of the Java Programming Language is portability, which means that computer programs written in the Java language must run similarly on any supported hardware/operating-system platform. Another alluring feature is developers’ ability to build solutions much more quickly, given the high availability of open source libraries developed and tested by the user community (i.e. The Apache Jakarta Project, Google Web Toolkit, sourceforge.net, java-source.net). Java is not for every application though, as applications with higher performance needs have tended to lean towards the use of the C or C++ programming language as Java features like Garbage collection and interpretation of Java bytecode have implications on performance.

The C Programming Language and Object Oriented version C++ are among the most popular of languages used in application development today. The kernel source code for the Linux and Unix operating systems are written in the C Programming Language. Linux/Unix is popular platform for business and enterprise servers hosting applications and it follows that applications written in C/C++ have some functionality, performance and other advantages since the underlying code for these operating systems is written in C.

In recent years the emergence of programming languages like Ruby has become useful for applications that focus on user-interface design. Languages like AJAX have combined web based mark-up and scripting languages like HTML, XML, and Javascript to create a more robust and powerful Rich Internet Application (RIA). Perl has been a favorite for automation scripts and simple regular expression text parsing. PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Python is a multi-paradigm programming language that permits the developer to select from a variety of programming styles.

The bottom-line when it comes to Application Development is that most applications could feasibly be developed with a great variety of programming languages. Those developers that stand out from the rest are able to make sensible decisions as to which language to be used. Seismic developers make sensible decisions.