Affino Platform Upgrades

It’s taken a while, but we’re very happy with how Affino is now running on the Amazon and Yotta clouds. There’s been a solid couple of years effort now to tune it and optimise it, and things are working out extremely well right now.

It means that it’s time to update some of the key platform elements so that we can take advantage of some of the great new developments from our infrastructure partners and software providers. The key benefits we can see are going to be faster development, more effective scaling, better cloud handling and improved performance.

We will also be converting all our display code to HTML 5. This is going to be a massive project but is key to a lot of developments we will be undertaking, primarily the new adaptive mobile and tablet interfaces.

HTML 5

The single biggest project we will be undertating, i.e. a couple of man-months of development will be to re-code Affino into HTML 5. As mentioned, this is key to our Mobile, Tablet and App developments; it is also key to our migration from Flash / Flex, which much as we love it, is clearly struggling to get any traction on the new post PC devices.

There are a lot of related projects here such as re-working the Control Centre to use dynamic HTML, updating all the charting components to use images or HTML 5 and the mobile APIs.

ColdFusion 9

We’re very happy with ColdFusion 8, it does pretty much everything we need of it, and it seems to us that the development platforms have become pretty mature in the same way that the underlying web servers are now mature technolgies.

We really like some of the new developments in ColdFusion 9 though including the indexing / search developments; improvements in the cloud licencing; and it’s ability to expose functionality as services. i’m sure we’ll discover a host of additional ones once we have it in the hands of our development team.

SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 brings a lot to the table, but for us the overriding factor is the improved performance we’ll be able to deliver to the Affino community.

Affino 6.5

All of these changes mean that we’ll be bringing out a major new Affino release in Q2 / Q3. As well as all of the above, it will include a raft of usability focused enhancements and the v1 Mobile platform. Some great stuff to look forward to.