About Us
We develop and maintain lightweight enterprise java applications. By “lightweight” we mean applications that can be developed quickly, are easy to maintain and scale well … we certainly don’t mean light on features! We believe in using the right tools for the job, taking into account your skills and resources, budget and other constraints – we won’t force any technology or methodology on you.
Our Approach
We are not an outsourcing company, our consultants supplement your team, offering a guiding hand and helping you to raise your game to levels you never thought possible. We work alongside you to diagnose and resolve problems, improve your architecture, boost performance and improve stability. We won’t just write a report and walk away, we’ll actually help you to implement our recommendations, acting as mentors to your team members. Every Raptor consultant has a minimum of 5 years commercial experience of the relevant technology and holds relevant certifications and accreditations.
Spring certified consultants 
Spring is a hot commodity and we love it! All our Spring consultants are now fully certified by Springsource. If you need help with your Spring project contact us now!
Technology
We do have a preferred stack of tools and technologies that we like to work with. These have been tried and tested in the enterprise market and are now the de-facto standard for lightweight development.
SPRING
Spring – We just love Spring … it’s immensely flexible, it’s fast (very fast) and best of all it makes testing a breeze. We’re not happy delivering code unless we can write an automated test to verify it works and to prevent regression, Spring allows us to do this. Spring is also very secure because it’s modular – we only need to deploy the elements we need, giving you a much smaller attack surface compared to other frameworks.
Webflow
Webflow – For web applications with long running business processes or “conversations”, or applications with complex navigation rules we think Spring Webflow is the best candidate. We have seen too many applications with nasty navigation and session management logic built into controllers. Webflow allows us to externalise this, keeping your code clean and easy to maintain.
Tapestry
Tapestry – Although Tapestry has never made it into the big league in terms of enterprise web development we think it should sit right up there. The component-driven nature of the framework allows us to write web based applications that mirror traditional rich GUI behavior. Code maintenance is a breeze as we develop reusable and extensible “widgets” which can be used across your site. Designers love Tapestry as well because it uses “invisible instrumentation” – a fancy name for a simple concept: dynamic Tapestry code can be edited in dreamweaver as if it were a plain html file.
Tomcat
Tomcat/Spring tcServer - Tomcat and the Spring framework are a compelling proposition. We have ound Tomcat to be fast, stable and simple to manage. When an appropriate session management strategy (e.g. memcached or teracotta) is employed it will even scale nicely to hundreds of nodes per cluster. We’ve developed a range of JMX based management and onitoring tools which can be used to manage Tomcat directly or act as a bridge to other tools such as Tivoli. Tomcat used to be a developers favorite … now the ops guys love it too!
Maven
Maven – Some love it, some hate it … we love it! Maven was developed with large, complex projects in mind. Ant served us well but given the scope and size of the projects we work on today we would struggle without Maven. We use it for everything from configuring our IDEs through to running integration tests and deploying applications onto servers.
Terracotta
Terracotta – Caching is an essential component of any high load architecture but so is clustering and load balancing. Developing an enterprise caching strategy is no simple task, fortunately Terracotta allows us to deploy distributed cacheʼs to support anything from pre-rendered jsps through to database calls.
Mule
Mule – SAO is no longer a buzzword, itʼs a standard pattern for enterprise systems. We have found Mule to be one of the best ESB engines on the market today. Like Spring its lightweight, flexible, easy to manage and secure … what else could we ask for?
Methodology
We’re not dogmatic about development methodology. In general we prefer agile, especially Scrum but for large projects this doesn’t work, at least not “out of the book”. We believe the best approach is to pick and choose concepts from scrum, xp, rup and use them as appropriate. For example we think it’s still a good idea to have daily standup, even in a rup environment. The choice of development methodology is something we’ll discuss with you. we’ll offer suggestions based on our experience but ultimately it’s your choice and we’ll fit in.
