Domain Expertise

Modern computing happens in the context of various platforms. Programmers must be proficient in more than a language or particular product, but must be aware of the idiomatic usage of an entire constellation of products in each platform. We are also moving towards a new platform: a world of of cooperative ecosystems of services - each running in their own platform. Only creative architects are prepared to reap the full advantages of this new world.

Geographic Information Systems

A great deal of business and scientfic computing requires the ability to reason spatially, located data in the real world, and perform geometric queries. GIS can be a revolutionary enabler in most applications. Palladium has expertise with GIS systems, including industry leader ESRI, especially in the following areas:

- Large GIS-enabled databases, especially where data is generated or consumed by automatic simulations and processes where there is algorithmic geometric manipulation such as spatial joins, distance problems, shape unions, and the like.
- Systems with geographically far-flung users where a server-side or web based solution is prudent. Web-based GIS is a revolutionary concept with unique challenges.
- Security-sensitive GIS data
- Projection system and transform intricacies.
- Geocoding and routing (street addresses and trip planning)

Microsoft's high profile .NET initiative is generally misunderstood, especially by architects and evangelists with a Java background. .NET is a computing platform, a new set of languages, and an emphasis on service-oriented programming. In Palladium's opinion, the abstractions the .NET team have built into ASP.NET (for web applications) and ADO.NET (for data access) are worth the price of admission alone, and mean massive productivity improvements for good developers.

Web applications, scientific programs, Windows rich client (desktop) applications and cooperative web services are just easy to develop, and perform extremely well. Microsoft has done an excellent job cultivating a thriving marketplace of component vendors, meaning that many strong 3rd party controls and applications are available. This leaves more time for developers to focus on their underlying problems, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

Business Process Management

Palladium has developed a common platform for portfolio management, process management and dashboard reporting to several large companies. By starting with these building blocks, Palladium can quickly build tools for internal management of complex business processes or portfolios.

The Java universe, having fueled both the commercial gold-rush of the dot-com days, and the open source movement, is populated with very bright stars. Web applications, web services, application & persistence services, security infrastructures are all things the Java world has good answers for. We are especially excited about Eclipse, Java 1.5, and the advent of good O-R packages like Hibernate. The signature J2EE components, JSPs and EJBs, are powerful abstractions with good deployment options avaiable.

The widespread availability of excellent open-source packages -- funded by major players and individuals -- makes Java a compelling platform choice. Java's client story is finally good - with good windowing options built into all the virtual machines and tools for building Swing applications.

C# and Java are ultimately very similar languages. With C# 2.0 introducing anonymous functions and templates, and Java 1.5 bringing implicit boxing and generics, these langauges will remain essentially identical in expressive power. Our programmers take their fundamental object oriented and functional programming skills back and forth between the two.

Easy to deride (and misuse) as the worlds most bloated serialization format, XML's true power comes in its attendant standards: XPath, XQuery, XSLT. When used in web services as RPC or messaging layers, the flexibility of XML allows programs of all walks of life to talk with each other smoothly and efficiently. Flexible schemas allow sophisticated compound data (such as documents and reports) to be stored and queried efficiently, while allowing for future expansion. Native support in Oracle and SQL Server databases for XML is an enabler every application should be looking at.

ESRI provides a broad platform for GIS work on several platforms. We have extensive experience working with ArcObjects, their extensible library. Palladium works to unify ESRI's "GIS-centric" world view with traditional programming platforms' "geometry-unaware" worldviews, with special emphasis on such enabling technologies as GML and native database spatial types such as Oracle Spatial.

Cross-platform deployments, legacy code and the need for speed all conspire to leave C++ as one of the world's most important languages. Palladium employs developers who have been knee deep in STL, templates, pointers to function pointers and all that C++ goodness.