Catesby Design Limited specializes
in the design
of Web Applications systems using Active Server Pages, Visual Basic
and SQL databases such as Oracle, SQL Server and Access.
We can supply professional IT personnel on a contract basis,
working on your site as a part of your in-house team, or in our own
offices, linked by the internet. You are welcome to
browse around this site, to find out more about the services we can offer.
About Catesby Design Ltd.
Catesby Design is a UK Limited Company established in 1989.
 |
In the early days, we were involved in the design of digital electronic circuits, and
systems combining dedicated hardware and real-time control software. Software development
was mainly in various assembler languages but included some C, both cross-compiled and to
run on a PC controlling specialized hardware. The picture shows a
Disk Emulator card, used to test disk controller sub-systems
to ensure that they would work correctly with disk drives that
are operating at the edges of their specified performance
bands as well as with a typical example. |
| When Microsoft released Visual Basic, the company's focus changed to PC-based software
programming and the design of desktop applications in VB. Version 1 was widely regarded as
not a 'serious' development tool, mainly by those who had invested a great deal of time
learning C++. By the time version 3 was in use, with its ODBC database links, the myth had
been exposed. VB continues to be dominant even with the rise of intranets and the world
wide web. Related languages VBA and VBScript are finding their way into other areas, such
as office applications, as macro and scripting tools. |
 |
 |
Visual Basic is still an important part of the picture, but increasingly it is used to
implement server-side business objects, with the web technologies, particularly Active
Server Pages, FrontPage and Visual InterDev, being used to design the user interface. In
fact, with versions 5 and now 6, VB has become the first choice for the middle-layers of
web-based applications. |
About our name
Catesby is a name that most people will have heard before, but not many will have ever
known anyone actually called Catesby. We have collected together a few facts and
a potted history of the Catesby family, which can be
traced back to the time of the Doomsday Book.
What we do
- Web
Applications
- The web isn't just for static pages like this site! It has many advantages over
'traditional' client-server systems. Until recently, client-server meant a client
application running on Users' PCs, written in (e.g.) Visual Basic or C++, and a middleware
layer such as SQL*Net (Oracle) or VBSQL (SQL Server) to talk to the database system
running on a server. This structure puts a heavy responsibility on the Users' PCs, as most
if not all of the system's functionality is wrapped up in the client application. System
designers have to consider how the application is to be distributed, installed and
upgraded, ensure that the target PCs are adequately specified, and provide user and
technical support.
- Also, the middleware protocols do not always perform well over wide-area networks:
particularly international links where bandwidth is limited and end-to-end signal delay is
large.
- However, the HTTP protocol was designed to perform in such environments! There are a
number of immediate benefits from just moving most of the system's functionality from the
Users' PCs to a Web Server.
- International systems perform acceptably.
- The software running on the Users' PCs is a standard browser; distribution, installation
and support are not such big issues.
- Any functionality that remains on the Users' PCs is downloaded from the Web Server as
either Active-X or Java.
- There is an almost natural implementation of a three-tier client-server system; the user
interface is contained within the browser, the Business layer is implemented on the Web
Server, and the database server is, well, the database server.
- The use of the Web as a host for a client-server system puts an emphasis on user
interface design. Users expect a web system to look like any other well-designed site.
- It's easier to link systems to one another and allow users to move freely from one
system to the next. It is also easier to make sub-systems common, especially with the
object-oriented features available in the languages and development tools.
- Portfolio
Take a look at some of the sites that we have worked on
recently:-
- www.artworker.co.uk
- While this site is undoubtedly pretty, its the database
integration that we want you to think about here. The
e-commerce section sells a range of at least 7,000 items,
and the site allows visitors to find what they want by
choosing from a hierarchy of categories, or by searching
for keywords or product codes. The functionality was built
using Microsoft Visual Interdev to develop Active Server
Pages, Visual Basic for Server-side Business Layer
objects, and SQL Server as the database system.
- www.lmra.co.uk
- This site is designed very simply by making good use of
Microsoft FrontPage.
- www.msbra.co.uk
- This is a very simple site that does not make any use of
any server extensions.
- Active Server Pages
- Microsoft's Active Server Pages add-on for Internet Information Server is the key
technology that will make web-based client-server systems happen for most
organizations.
Its quite possible to achieve similar systems using Unix, C, CGI and Perl, but the use of
VB-Script, together with the painless database connectivity using ADO and ODBC mean that
most organizations will be able to build a better system, faster.
-
- Visual Basic
- With version 5, Microsoft removed (almost) all the possible reasons not to use VB. It
can build Active-X Objects, compile to native code, and generally produce results in a
fraction of the time required using C++. Version 6 builds on the features of version 5, with a new data access
model, better support for web applications, and some small tweaks to the core language.
-
- Databases
- SQL Server and Oracle are two of the leading relational database systems currently in
use in client-server scenarios. Access is useful for prototyping systems, but even
Microsoft warns against using it as a multi-user database: it just wasn't designed to
perform this function. Undoubtedly On-Line Analytical Processing will become more and more
important to the analysis of data, with the latest releases from Microsoft (SQL Server 7)
and Oracle (Oracle Express) including support for OLAP.
-
- Portfolio
-
Take a look at some of the sites that we have worked on
recently:-
- www.artworker.co.uk
- While this site is undoubtedly pretty, its the database
integration that we want you to think about here. The
e-commerce section sells a range of at least 7,000 items,
and the site allows visitors to find what they want by
choosing from a hierarchy of categories, or by searching
for keywords or product codes. The functionality was built
using Microsoft Visual Interdev to develop Active Server
Pages, Visual Basic for Server-side Business Layer
objects, and SQL Server as the database system.
- www.lmra.co.uk
- This site is designed very simply by making good use of
Microsoft FrontPage.
- www.msbra.co.uk
- This is a very simple site that does not make any use of
any server extensions.
If you would like more information about how Catesby Design can help you harness Web
technology, or to contact us directly, please make use of the email address below.
For more information please email: info@catesby.co.uk
Copyright © 1997-9 Catesby Design Limited
Last modified: Wednesday, 21 June 2000