Why WebCrossing is so great for web development

WebCrossing is the best agile development platform for launching highly customized Web 2.0 dynamic sites with a  minimum of development time and maximum efficiency.

Elliptics is happy to create a site for you using any technology suitable for your needs. Sometimes WordPress is perfect. Sometimes a LAMP (Linus/Apache/MySQL/PHP) solution works best.
WordPress has many features built-in. And it is highly extensible with plugins.  Elliptics can create a site for you using WordPress and plug-ins and customize it as you like.

But if you’re doing something that requires complex data structures then WebCrossing’s integrated NoSQL object-oriented database is what you are looking for. Plus all the basic parts are there, out-of-the-box: users, authentication, granular access privileges, folders for any kind of organization, discussions, an integrated mail server for post-by-mail, and much more.

Web app development is overall easier and more flexible in WebCrossing. It’s lots easier in WebCrossing to, for example, add extra properties to a user or any node. It’s a metadata and complex structure advantage.
There are lots of things we can demonstrate which are simply easier to script in WebCrossing.

For example, we can show the steps needed to write a script which creates a user and adds an arbitrary property to that user. And we can compare that with the steps needed to do that with a LAMP system: set up tables and fields, make SQL requests, etc.

In WebCrossing’s Server-side JavaScript  language all you have to do is this:

(new User(‘doug’)).pet = ‘bird’;

The user is created and has a “pet” property with the value “bird” associated with the user. We didn’t need to create or modify any tables to add fields or whatever.  And we didn’t need to make any database requests, etc. It’s just done and stored in the object oriented database.

The user object can be found with User.lookup(‘doug’). We can store the user object in a variable for convenience, and look up the values like this.

var theUser = User.lookup(‘doug’);

The value we want is just theUser.pet.

We can find all the properties associated with a user by just enumerating the user object’s properties:

 for (var i in theUser) {
        + i + ‘: ‘ + theUser[i] + ‘<br />’;
    }

The same thing is possible for any object in WebCrossing’s database, including nodes (folders, discussions, messages, custom nodes, individual files, etc.) No “serialization” is required. Objects are stored and used directly.

It really is an extremely powerful and flexible development system for dynamic web applications. Think of the possibilities.