Why London?

The programming business model has been moving in two, very separate, very different directions. On one hand, we have the outsourced coding, rafts of specifications are drawn up, meticulously detailed, printed on a forest's worth of dead tree, pored over and dispatched East. Months of silence follow, and, at the end of a communications winter, a product, in some form, is delivered. Perhaps it's correct, perhaps an assumption was made early on that skewed the resulting functionality, perhaps it's entirely wrong. Whichever way you slice it, and whatever the outcome, it is unlikely, unless all involved are beyond fluent in UML, that the system will be as precisely tailored as you might have hoped.

The other approach is a highly communicative, rapidly developed, easily prototyped development process, taking place near your place of business, in your time zone, and with people you can meet face to face. There is a simple reason this approach produces better results. Forays into new methods of doing business are always a process of change. You might know where you are, and where you want to be, but how you get there, as a collection of people, resources and processes, is very much an experimental area. So that is what we do. We let you experiment, play, toy with your new environment. We can do this because we can visit you and show our latest ideas, your latest features in action, talk you through them, talk to your staff, see your office, absorb your culture, and then translate that onto the web and into your Byng system.

Nestling in the creative corner of London that is Shoreditch, we have ready access to a rich vein of creative talent. From Flash designers, print artists, graphic agencies to the most creative problem-solving programmers around, this wealth of talent is at our - and your - fingertips.

Locating in London gives us the ability to easily visit and be visited, at home or away, our sites and tools go with us, so whether we're on site helping to hammer out your system, or toiling away in London, our communication lines are always open, our work nonstopping, shepherding you and your system towards it's happy arrival on the web.

Why PHP?

Techy reply...

A programming language is what you make it. A bad programmer can make a "secure" language insecure, and a good programmer can make anything secure. We looked for languages that implemented our core principles of Object-Relationship Modelling, extension, abstraction and polymorphism, as well as giving us the freedom to blur the more traditional programming lines, and, of course, develop, test and deploy rapidly.

With PHP we found optional strong typing, adept type juggling and powerful interface definition suitable for our environment, needs and processes. Being the most populate language didn't hurt either, and the fact it plays so well with Apache and MySQL, two of the most prominent, well-maintained and stable open source products in the stable, sealed the deal.
We have over 100,000 lines of PHP code, most in objects, some in procedural code, all based on a rigorously stable framework, serving millions of pages a day and raising programming up to a level where the simple bits (forms, databases, objects, CRUD) are as easy as breathing, allowing us to weave our magic with ease and poise, creating fast, stable, working results very quickly.

Non-techy reply

PHP is a programming language. We've amassed a library of thousands of lines of code, to run everything from database connections, form building and data validation through to user account management, metric generation and audit tracking. Our systems have these things innately. They're baseline features, in our opinion, what's important is how they're implemented, how these elements are grouped together to form your Byng system. We use a lot of objects. These represent entities - things - on your system, an address, news article or blog post. We create these objects, weave them together, build their relationships with other objects on your system and create a model of how data and information behaves in your organisation.

We think it offers the best cost-effectiveness (it's free) and reliability (it's the most popular and actively maintained web programming language) and find it very simple to use, powerful when needed, and suits our purpose of rapidly prototyping your system, showing you new features daily and providing you with a tangible product quickly.

Our rapid prototyping approach allows you to correct us if we sway, allows us to explore new avenues you might not have considered and, above all, lets us show you stable, high-gloss features, and refine those features, often and easily. We don't "go dark" when we take on a project, we ask plenty of questions, absorb as much information about you and your processes as possible and then show you, quickly, prototypes of what we think your Byng system would, could and should do.