I consider anything Active Discovery Designs mine and have an agreement about that, but I am no more associated with ActiveDiscovery, Inc., so I am looking under which name I will continue my services.
Please note I am not associated in any way anymore with ActiveDiscovery, Inc. and vice versa, but (of course) I will continue serving existing and new clients, for now as a freelance (full stack) web developer.
Contact details are still the same, so you can just go the contact page if you want to contact me.
Guus Ellenkamp
Active Discovery Application Framework
What is a framework
For web developers we think the term 'web development framework' quite clear. For non (web) developers the main question would probably not even be "What is a Framework?" but rather "What would I or my web or application developer need a framework for".
Maybe the clearest description of a software application framework would be something like the foundation and the main (invisible) structure of a building, together with the drawings and instructions how to build it. And a major advantage would be that it consists of many standard 'building blocks' and again, the instructions how to use it.
Advantages of a software application framework
Basically the main advantage of a software application framework is that many parts, or modules, can be re-used. This goes even further than the sample of the building, as software code can be easily copied, while building parts can be standard, but still need to be produced.
A related advantage of using partially the same code for a software application is that errors in the code are more easy to detect and solved. Instead of one site or application experiencing all the 'software bugs', with re-usable code many sites and applications spread the discovery of 'bugs' and also solving a bug in the code that is being used for many sites or applications means that it is basically solved for all the sites or applications using that code.
Please note that 'software bugs' exist in many, if not all, software applications. Even though this may sound weird to you as a 'user' it is just a fact of life any software developer will confirm to you. Fortunately many bugs never show up as they often only occur in rare circumstances.
Features of the Active Discovery Application Framework
Below features may not always be understood by non-developers, but we are proud that our framework has the following features:
Very well documented. This may not sound as important, but in our opinion it is the maintenance of a website or software application defines the total cost of the website or application in the end and not the initial making of it. Proper software maintenance in general relies on proper documentation, so documentation is a very important, if not the most important, feature in software development.
SEO friendly. Of course it is very important for you that your website can be found on the internet. This is why we built in many 'SEO-friendly' features in our framework. Even though we're not a SEO company, we think we have the right tools to make your site very SEO friendly with page specific titles, keywords and description and we also found ways how to deal with SEO and multi-language in a very efficient way.
Developed with 'multi language' in mind. Multi language may not be important to you, so in that case we may advise you to use another development method than with the Active Discovery Application Framework, but the internet is an international medium, so in many cases mult-language is an important feature of a website, which is why we made our framework a 'multi-language framework'.
Many standard pages. Initially our framework only had standard pages for user registration, user logon and user administration. Over time we found that pages we developed for one site or application also made sense in many other sites or applcations. That is why our framework now has many standard pages that are just available without any additional development effort. Included are for example a blog page, a forum page, a statistics page and a 'feedback' page. The last page for easy handling of user feedback, comments or complaints.
Multi timezone. This feature might sound weird to you as most people just stay in their hometown except for holidays, but again, the internet is worldwide, so users of a website often reside in different timezones which is why we put a lot of effort in proper date-and-time handling. We have standard ways of dealing with different timezones and many features to display the available date and time information in for example the users time and maybe even more important, in the users date and time format.
Fully configurable. This feature is very important for you as a (potential) client. While our framework consists of many 'standard' items, for example the standard pages, we have many built in features to make your website or application look as yours and not as someone elses, even if both sites would be built with our framework. For the graphics we use 'templates' as many other software frameworks do, but we think our templates are just a bit more clever than the general available 'Open Source' templates, which in the end will make the development of your website or web application just that more efficient.