• Architecture, selection of technical architecture tools and techniques, and definition of development process and environment
• Object-oriented analysis and design, including use case, domain analysis, and model development in UML
• Programming, in a wide variety of languages
• Web site server design

We often find ourselves wearing many hats in the projects we undertake, following a project through its entire lifecycle from architecture to domain analysis, design and implementation. In an age of specialization, we pride ourselves in our ability to provide a wide range of development services, capable of making the shift from theoretician to practitioner.

Architecture

Our architecture services include system and component level architecture development; definition of development processes, environment and tools; and identification and integration of third-party and proprietary components.

Our architecture development experience ranges from small to large scale projects, and includes R&D, new development, and system conversions. In all cases, architecture development entails the same basic steps:

1. Identify system and business goals and stakeholders
2. Identify and prioritize architecture properties (performance, ease of use, maintainability, etc.)
3. Identify major subsystems and components
4. Specify technical platform (hardware, operating system, frameworks, COTS)
5. Specify development environment and processes (design tools, version control, languages, IDE's, third-party libraries and components, etc.)

We have over 15 years experience in object-oriented development, including Smalltalk, to C++ and Java, with a variety of methodologies (OOSE, CRC, etc.). Our analysis and design experience includes use case analysis, domain modeling (including scenario development and analysis models), and class modeling. We are most familiar with UML and Rational Rose.

Additionally, we have had good success in applying design patterns to our analysis and design approach. This allows us to leverage "best of breed" practices into our work. By staying current with software engineering tools and methods, we have had achieved quality and productivity of our projects.

Programming Services

Hill Systems has extensive programming experience in a variety of languages and platforms. Our language experience includes Java, C++/C, Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk, and assembler (just to name a few). Development platforms have included various flavors of Unix (Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux), and Windows. Our database experience includes Sybase, Oracle, and mySQL.

More recently, Hill Systems has been involved in various J2EE projects, with an emphasis on servlet and JSP development, including XML/XLST processing.

Web Server Design

Hill System's recent activities have been in server-side web design, utilizing servlet and JSP technologies. Most recently, we have incorporated the DAX document automation framework with JSP to generate dynamic content using XML.

One of the most exciting possibilities we're exploring is the migration away from thick-client, 2 tiered desktop user interfaces to thin-client browser based interfaces. With the advent of advanced page generation techniques, such as DHTML, XHTML, and Javascript, we see thin client applications eventually replacing traditional desktop GUI's such as Visual Basic, MVC++ and Powerbuilder. Using servlets and JSP's as the intermediary between the client and backend stores, we need only deploy business domain components once (on the server). This thin client approach also eliminates the maintenance and distribution headaches associated with deploying thick-clients to hundreds or thousands of desktops.