Brett Burnett History

We recently migrated our website and blog from Drupal to Jekyll. In this article we cover the reasons behind our decision.

Isomorphic web design is an approach to web development that is gathering momentum. The concept of Isomorphic web design is simple, dynamically generate HTML using either server or client rendering based on which approach yields the best experience for our audience. Server rendered content is very fast if built correctly; however, client rendered Single Page Applications (SPA's) have shown that they can offer faster page transitions leading to a more engaging user experience. Users typically equate the experience of using a SPA with mobile apps or desktop applications. Popular web-based e-mail clients like Gmail and Outlook 365 are textbook examples of well written SPA's. Users of these systems can fluidly navigate between reading, composing, searching, and managing e-mail without the jarring page flashes and loading delays associated with a typical server rendered web application.

Welcome to our third article discussing website design and development in Clojure. Clojure is an exciting Lisp language that offers full-stack web development, compiling to the JVM for server execution and to JavaScript for client side execution. In our first article we presented Clojure as a server-side programming language by demonstrating a simple REST API for a Single Page Application (SPA). In our second article we demonstrated

Today it’s easy to assume there is a mobile app or website for anything you need. Businesses are compelled to represent their brand, products, and services in the mobile space in order to keep up with competition, maintain market share, and attract new customers. Increasingly there are stiff penalties for ignoring your mobile presence with your customers and prospects.

2015 marks BHW's ninth year of web development in Austin. It's fun for us to chat with old clients and hear that they're still using systems we built for them nine years ago. Recently during a college recruiting trip we actually had to register for a career fair and post jobs in a system that we built for a client in 2002. We're so happy to see projects like these stand the test of time, because nine years in web development might as well be an eternity.

In our first article on Single Page Applications we presented a REST JSON API running on Clojure with CouchDB. In this article we build on the previous article by introducing our client-side application.

When starting a Business Intelligence (BI) project the first challenge technical teams face is often the most difficult, "how do we shape our data to meet our needs?". Why is this difficult?

The single page application (SPA) approach has revolutionized our approach to development.  Fantastic client-side Javascript frameworks like AngularJS, Knockout, and React have made the transition easy and fun.  As we’ve written more and more SPAs an unexpected trend has emerged.  We’ve moved to a thin server architecture for delivering our back-end solutions on SPA projects.  We increasingly think of the application tier as plumbing, only responsible for data storage with a little authentication, authorization, and validation thrown in.