Dupree Dance conducts high caliber dance conventions and competitions in cities throughout the United States.

Interaria is excited to announce the launch of an extensive web application driven website for Dupree Dance, www.dupreedance.com, that features an online registration and check-out process for dance studios and dancers attending Dupree Dance’s dance conventions. Prior the new website, Dupree Dance had relied on paper based registration process that due to extensive data collection and variables required a lot of management and processing time. The new database driven online registration system, designed and developed by the Interaria web development team, provides a system for the Dupree Dance administrators to keep track of all data and run custom reports – ultimately making processing times faster.

The site features several custom web applications such as studio profile account creation, dance routines listings, loyalty program discount calculations, special teacher offers processing, total fees processing, and My Account functionalities.

The website’s database and web applications were coded with PHP/MySQL by Interaria’s web developers. The step-by-step registration process utilizes AJAX technology. The site’s identity and graphics were custom designed by the Interaria team. For more information about our web design and web application development services, please call 214-909-3900.

Mobile sites are designed to provide an optimal user experience for visitors accessing the web through their mobile devices. Today, we can develop mobile sites using several different mobile web application frameworks.

Interaria recommends considering the following options for mobile site development. 

1) jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile is an HTML5 based web application framework for smartphones and tablets based on jQuery and jQuery UI. jQuery Mobile supports a very extensive range of devices and provides a seamless method for extending existing applications to mobile and tablet that were originally built to run inside the desktop browser. The key benefits for choosing jQuery Mobile for web application development are:  jQuery Mobile is open source / free and has a large global development community behind it, supporting it and actively pushing it forward.

2) SproutCore

SproutCore is an open source HTML5 web application framework that specializes in delivering a smooth and full featured “native-feel” web application experience across browsers for all screens: desktop, tablet, and mobile. Apple Computer is known to have used SproutCore as the underlaying codebase for their iCloud applications including the web versions of Apple’s iWork, Mail, and Calendar. For a web developer, the key benefit for choosing the SproutCore mobile web application framework is that it is based on Javascript and it allows one to build out highly responsive and very fluid interfaces for web applications.

3) Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch is a robust HTML5 mobile web application framework with over 50 built-in components. For the end-user, Sencha Touch’s javascript engine delivers a very fast mobile browser interface experience. Sencha Touch goes way beyond providing UI elements for mobile as it is more of an entire programming eco-system unto itself.  Because of its coding structure, Sencha Touch is more oriented toward software programmers than web designers. Sencha Touch is currently offered with a free Commercial Software License.

4) Responsive UI Design

Mobile applications developed with HTML5 utilizing responsive user interface design focus on adjusting the presentation of web media content for mobile device use. A strong well planned out CSS rules and coding is the key for successfully implementing the responsive design method. According to set CSS rules, the display of the applications’s content layout and components may be programmed to auto-reformat for display mobile differently than on tablet or desktop. An example of responsive web design would be for a layout that displays four columns of content in a ‘landscape’ view on tablet devises, but when in ‘portrait’ view, would auto-shift to show only two columns of content instead of 4. Further, then when the same content is viewed on a mobile devices, the content would shift to slim down further to show only one column of content. Responsive UI Design is not a mobile web application framework but rather a method for allowing well planned and coded HTML5 content to display differently on desktop, table and mobile.

Which Platform to Choose?

The decision of which mobile development framework to choose is determined by several criteria such as the mobile site’s navigation structure, amount of custom content provided for mobile users only, requirements for the design and content to adjust for different screen sizes and resolutions, the amount of custom coding required to launch your new mobile web app, and the amount of coding and development that has already taken place.

Contact us to determine which mobile web application framework provides the most optimal platform for developing an engaging mobile media presence for your company.

In this blog post we discuss the use of a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework in the context of custom web application development. What exactly is a Model-View-Controller (MVC)? Wikipedia gives the following insight and definition:

MVC (Model-View-Controller) is an architectural design pattern that encourages improved application organization through a separation of concerns. It enforces the isolation of business data (Models) from user interfaces (Views), with a third component (Controllers) (traditionally) managing logic, user-input and coordinating both the models and views. The pattern was originally designed by Trygve Reenskaug during his time working on Smalltalk-80 (1979) where it was initially called Model-View-Controller-Editor. MVC went on to be described in depth in “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” (The “GoF” or “Gang of Four” book) in 1994, which played a role in popularizing its use.

Although a Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern was originally formulated in the late 1970′s, it has more recently gained increased relevancy as a software modeling development system due to recent efficiency requirements when building web applications. Separating the View (presentation layer) from the applications inner workings (Control and Model) allows independent development of each element. The benefits of the separation are several:

1. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for the design to be maintained and independently updated from the codebase. It is not uncommon that over time the design sensibilities may seem outdated, new design considerations become available, or new devices with different UI requirements become available. Separating the design and code make it easier for the developer to update the designs without affecting the established code.
2. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for the Web applications features to grow over time. It may be the case with a web application that with new users, new features need to be added that weren’t originally anticipated. When new web application systems are developed they can be modeled according to already established graphical user interfaces.
3. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for new representations or presentations of the same data, such as showing a chart of data as a pie chart or as a bar chart.
4. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for new formatting of text or image content, such as a styling of a user interactive slideshow.
5. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for the division of labor in the development process: one developer can work on the core logic and data structure (Controller / Model) while another can simultaneously work on its presentation to the user (graphical user interface or View).
6. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for a web application’s functionality to be repurposed based on adjustments to a configuration file, independent of its GUI elements.
7. Web application development in the MVC framework allows for scalability by centralizing re-usable building blocks of code. When new features are added to the web application, those new features can re-use the existing web application’s foundation code elements.

Web applications are sometimes a one-off for a specific purpose, but often times their functionality requirements grow over time as more users begin using the system. It is not uncommon to build out a system with a certain feature set and then soon after launch find that some features are more appreciated than other features, requiring further enhancements.

Interaria’s custom Web Application Development utilizing the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework takes into account that the web applications’ user interface designs and graphical components will likely need to be updated over time and that a continued development of the web applications functionality will likely expand over time. Web applications developed in the the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework allow for development flexibility, scalability and growth of visual design, user interfaces designs and the code base.

Contact Interaria at 214-909-3900 to discuss your company’s custom web application development needs.

Mobile and tablet devices not supporting the Flash player plugin have contributed to the overall decline of development of interactive web animations during the past few years.

Up until very recently, Web designers and developers have had very limited options to create cross-device compatible interactivity, typically relying on AJAX based components. Today we are closing the gap as new emerging technology and web programs are opening doors for new types of ‘Flash free’ interactive ‘animations’.

Adobe has brought in two new software products to the market, Adobe Edge, and CreateJS Toolkit built for Adobe Flash Pro CS6, that both offer promising steps towards more quickly produced code based HTML5 interactivity. Google has also developed a program called Google Swiffy which will convert Flash animations to HTML5.

Adobe Edge, currently in beta/preview mode, uses CSS to draw objects, javascript to animate objects, and HTML div’s to place these objects on the page. This is an intriguing solution for making web pages more interactive but is visually somewhat limited due to CSS code not being able to render complex vector drawings such as hexagons.

Complex vector graphic animations can be created using Flash Pro CS6 which can then be exported as web friendly SVG’s (scalable vector graphics), and animated on HTML5 canvas using either the new built-in CreateJS Toolkit or by using the Google .swf to HTML5 conversion tool Swiffy.

Adobe’s CreateJS Toolkit allows a developer to export Flash animations to HTML5 format so where one can then program the further interactivity of the vector graphics with javascript. Google Swiffy on the other hand allows the developer to program the interactivity of scalable vector graphics in Flash, and then converts the rendered .swf file to HTML5.

With the new interactive tools available, there are now ways for web designers and web developers to increase cross-device compatible interactive creativity both economically and efficiently. A designer/developer can now put together an interactive experience where the exported code renders on all modern browsers and devices without the use of the Flash Player Plugin.

Contact Interaria at 214-909-3900 to discuss your company’s cross-platform compatible HTML5 animation needs.

DQ Estimating is an Austin, Texas based development company of a professional estimating software system DQ2000.

Interaria’s web design and development team created a custom web identity design, layout and code for DQ Estimating. Our full solution includes a PHP/MYSQL content management system that allows fast and convenient web updates by the DQ Estimating staff. The website is at http://www.dqestimating.com