IT

Urban Guru's core business is IT consultancy and web application design, architecture and development. We use a number of technologies to build our applications, and have a wide range of experience covering everything from server configuration and security to database administration.

Application development

Urban Guru specialises in building database-driven web applications. We create customised data management applications, including intranets, e-commerce sites, and document, news and asset management systems. Our systems are designed from the ground up to be accessible, simple to use, and open.

Urban Guru employs a variety of methodologies to ensure our software gives you the following advantages:

Web-based - accessible from anywhere in the world with no need to install any software;
Secure - we use flexible permissions and authentication systems to ensure that you have complete control over who can access which bits of your application;
Accessible - all our sites comply with web standards and employ features to ensure they can be accessed easily by disabled users;
Simple to use - we take user interface design very seriously;
Customised - you will never hear us say that a feature is impossible to implement;
Carefully architected - we employ object orientated design patterns and extreme programming techniques to ensure our code is modular, well-tested, scalable, portable, maintainable and well-documented;
Open source - when we develop an application for you, you will receive the source code, and be able to modify it yourself or employ someone else to modify it for you.

Consultancy

Urban Guru specialists can provide consultancy on the following technologies:

J2EE using Tomcat, JBoss, Hibernate, Spring, Ant and JUnit
Database Administration on Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL
Server architecture and configuration on Linux and the Windows Server family, including clustering and load-balancing.
Server security, including firewalling, secure OS installations, logging, monitoring and intrusion detection.
Apache 1.3 / 2.0 and IIS 5.0 / 6.0
W3 technologies including XHTML, XSL, XSL-FO, CSS and DOM
Perl and CPAN
PHP and PEAR

Unless specifically requested by the client, we use either Java J2EE or PHP depending on the complexity and scalability requirements of the application. However we are also happy to create applications using Perl or Microsoft .NET technologies.

Urban Guru supports free software, and our frameworks are based on open source software. They are in the process of being prepared for distribution under the GNU general public license. We are confident that our service alone is reason enough to come back to us - and our clients agree.