Areas of expertise

Although Orange11 has worked on many different projects, for a wide array of customers, using many different technologies, we do have some specialties. These cover basically three areas of expertise: high scalability, search and content management.

High Scalability
Ever since one of the first projects we did, we have a strong focus on building highly scalable solutions. Many of our customers need systems that can scale with their business and the last thing they want is run in to performance problems and scalability limits once their business really takes off. Therefore, as the amount of data that organizations have to work with nowadays increases, consideration for scalability and performance are covered within the scope of the project, especially seen as most companies are faced with processing multi-billion records at any one time.

Search
Organizations struggle more and more with the huge amounts of data they have, whether it is monetizing it, trying to find a new purpose based on that data, etc. Furthermore, users expect each web application to provide the “Google-experience”, proving one simple search box and delivering highly relevant results. Users are no longer satisfied with filling out an advanced search form with numerous options in order to drill down to the information they are looking for. Furthermore, users expect things like facetted navigation, “did you mean…” functionality, etc.

This is where Orange11’s specialism comes in. We are the market leader when it comes to implementing open source search solutions. There is currently only one open source, high quality, proven search solution and that is Apache Solr. This solution is built on top of Apache Lucene, the Information Retrieval (IR) library that has been around for more than 10 years. Orange11 is the only company in The Netherlands that employs three committers on this project and works on some of the core features in both Lucene and Solr.

Content Management
Orange11 has extensive experience in this field and a long track record of successfully delivering content management solutions, for example rijksoverheid.nl, volkswagen.nl and many others. Below is an overview of the open source products that we use for building CMS solutions.

Dataset analysis, recommendations and enrichment
As more and more organizations struggle with what to do with the large amounts of data and how to direct their users to the right data the solutions required need to become more complex too. Making the data available for search is one thing, but one can go even further, by analyzing the data it can be enriched to provide a personalized recommendations to users.

Orange11 has extensive knowledge of the default open source data analysis framework called Apache Mahout. In order to cluster and/or classify the data and to provide the users with high quality recommendations, then Mahout is the framework to look into. This can provide even further leverage and result in high quality results. 

Web frameworks
Orange11 does not believe in the silver bullet technology, especially when it comes to web frameworks. That is why Orange11 always chooses a web framework based on the specific requirements of the project, where each one has its own unique qualities:
 

• Spring MVC – the web framework we use for realizing low-level web applications and REST APIs.
• Apache Wicket – a component based web framework that allows for reuse and provides a clear separation between application logic and presentation
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – low-level framework that makes it easy to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA), applications that run in the browser
• Vaadin – framework for building RIA applications, built on top of GWT and providing an extensive set of reusable and customizable components

Presentation technology
For all web projects, Orange11 builds its projects using modern web presentation technologies such as HTML 5, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). We make heavy use of JavaScript libraries like jQuery to minimize development costs and increase maintainability and browser independence.

Orange11 also has extensive experience with developing applications beyond just web, for example mobile devices, like iPhone / iPad and Android. Depending on the project requirements Orange11 chooses the right approach, either by developing a mobile web site or a native application to support all devices.