Under the development hood

The development team at Clear Books has been relatively quiet of late so what has been keeping the guys busy? Here’s a quick update.

The team has been working very hard under the hood.

Over Christmas and into the New Year there haven’t been very many new features released because on the surface nothing has changed, however, behind the scenes key functionality has been migrated over to an MVC framework.

In simple terms this new structure to the code makes it easier to debug, re-use, test, optimise and change in the future.

Whereas in the beginning Clear Books code was written in a very procedural way with code and content interwoven, it’s now very abstracted with code in one place and content in another using OOP practices.

Re-writing an application is a daunting prospect that may be ill advised. It has the potential to drag on to the detriment of producing new functionality, features and usability.

Here’s how we approached it:

• Identified the top 40 most used scripts/pages/features in the app and focused only on rewriting those.
• The rest of the app remains in our original procedural style.
• Set a deadline of 14th February to complete the migration.
• The lesser used pages will be migrated over time as and when we either fix bugs or improve the feature.

This change provides a solid foundation to the app. From that base our next mamoth task is a huge design and usability review which has already been initiated and an update will follow in due course.

And of course we’re always on the look out to recruit talented PHP developers to join our development team.