Philosophy
(For the More Technically Minded)

The cost to develop and maintain a computer program is directly proportional to the number of lines of code.

This observation was made by IBM in the late 60's, and is still true today. In order to minimize the development and maintenance costs to our clients, we use the Progress DBMS as out development language. Progress was first available in the mid 1980's, and the company has been growing every year since. For more information on Progress, see www.progress.com . We use a number of parameter driven templates to generate most of the required code, thus reducing the time required to prototype and develop systems.

Most of the data input to our systems is through a custom updatable browser that allows input only on one line at a time. This browser is optimized for fast input, allowing for either the tab or enter key to be used for moving between fields, and no mouse action required when entering multiple records. Any field that is based on another table value has the F1 (help) key lookup to the lookup table to return the desired value.

We use a graphical menu screen that uses large buttons to represent the main user tasks. These are supplemented by the standard drop down menu for other tasks such as file maintenance. See Sample Systems

Good database design reduces the complexity of the programming dramatically.

This fact is not always recognized , but whenever we see convoluted logic in programming of an inherently simple task, the database design is almost always the underlying problem. When we write new systems or modules, we make sure the database is properly designed and normalized. The resulting programs are much smaller and easier to write and maintain, with a lower cost of ownership to the client.