Solutions

pumptheory.com provides a wide range of IT Solutions to it's clients. We focus on designing and implementing innovative systems that enforce and deliver your business goals. Where possible we use open standards and a combination of custom, open source and proprietary software. pumptheory.com is committed to open source software and builds system using the following tools and projects: (this is not an exhaustive list)

OpenACS

Derived from the ArsDigita Community System which was donated to the open source community, OpenACS is an extremely rich environment for building web applications and services.

OpenACS delivers a large amount of functionality out of the box with no custom development:

• Ad Server
• Course Management
• E-Learning
• E-Commerce (including online payment gateways)
• Flexible access control (including multiple authentication methods)
• Forums
• Content Management
• Trouble/Bug Ticket Management
• Events Management
• Weblogging
• RSS Aggregator
• Image Library
• Online Surveys
• Internationalisation (currently supporting 36 languages)

And this is not an exhaustive list!

OpenACS also includes a rich set of developer libraries allowing for high levels of code reuse between your custom application and the standard applications. The developer community is strong and well funded with over 80 regular code committers and many more patch submitters. If this is techno-babble to you, basically it means that your custom application can be delivered with OpenACS in significantly less time and budget than you would expect.

OpenACS is used for many large and mission critical applications—you can read more about OpenACS at the website openacs.org

dotLRN

Built on top of OpenACS is the dotLRN e-Learning and course management system. dotLRN was originally developed for MIT's Sloan School of Management. It has subsequently been further enhanced and now favourably compares with commercial course management systems costing many millions of dollars. It is used by many large Universities and is being investigated by many more.

You can read more about dotLRN at the website dotlrn.org.

Perl

Perl is a well established development language for Internet technologies. The combination of Perl, the Apache web server, mod_perl and the Mason templating system allows complex web applications to be developed in a very structured manner. The code re-use afforded by the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) allows developers to focus on the real business problems by delivering many hundreds of basic (and not so basic) building blocks.

Similarly, the combination of Perl and the POE (Perl Object Environment) provides a framework for rapid development of network servers. Connect POE with CPAN modules such as the finite state machine Workflow module and you have the beginnings of a potent business process engine.

Other tools

Sometimes great solutions need imagination and innovation. pumptheory.com has the cross technology and cross platform experience to identify the best tools to use when designing and building your solution. Occasionally we need to train or hire in outside expertise. Among our non-core tools, some of the more regularly used are: