Back in May I blogged about writing some code in C and I wanted to give you an update to the progress. The original intent was to rewrite our two production products: SimpleSync and Portal to gain the benefits of developing in C. We decided to go a different route and write a new product first, THEN port our existing products to C.
We have been doing a bit of informal market research with our customers and found that there is a need for a web based white pages application. In effect you could publish all of your contact information directly from your Active Directory (Exchange) data. A simple use would be a phone directory. For now we are calling this product: Portal. At this point there isn't enough to even justify an alpha version as of yet, but we are slowly building up a pretty impressive base of code.
The long term goal in general is to make all of our products web based and multi-platform. Ideally we could even deliver our products on an appliance or virtual appliance. With this in mind we decided to use open source tools in our development. Here is a brief list of the libraries we are working with thus far.
To date all of these libraries have been integrated into the current Portal code. This is no small feat, each library need a bit of work to make it compile correctly in a Windows environment. Thankfully the unix ports will be very straightforward.
I will try and post updates weekly (possibly every two weeks) as the work progresses.
Happy New Year!