Technical skills & expertise

We know that all you really want is a successful business with a product that both satisfies and delights its users, be they your staff, customers, or both.

You need to be confident that we're going to deliver the best possible product we can, meeting your budget and deadlines. You need to be sure that the code we write is secure and scalable. Our track record shows that you can trust us to make the right technology decisions to not only bring your ideas to life, but to make them succeed both in the short term and in the long term as your business evolves.

Take a look at some of our work. 

Whether you're a start-up, an established company or a major player in your market, we can develop and deliver a technical strategy that will work for your business over many years. We start by building upon what you have, maintaining the integrity and efficiency of the systems that underpin your product and harnessing the benefits of technology step changes as they happen.

DabApps uses a well-integrated set of open-source technologies to build backend systems and web and mobile UIs. We try to avoid using the very latest cutting-edge tools (there’s a lot of risk working with unproven technology) but to use modern libraries and frameworks that are well-supported, have widespread industry adoption and great developer communities.  Over the years, we have developed a consistent stack of basic libraries we use that allows us to build software efficiently in a way that everyone on the team understands.

There are two main design patterns for web apps: multi-page application (MPA) and single-page application (SPA). Our stack has gradually moved from MPA to SPA, though both approaches are equally secure and scalable. With the SPA approach, the server is doing less of the work, and more work is done in the browser. The browser retrieves all of the code with a single page load and any added information is dynamically loaded to the page. Any interaction with the database will happen asynchronously in the background and the page never needs to reload. This makes apps much faster and greatly improves the user experience. Single-page apps enable interaction styles and user experiences that are impossible on a multi-page app. Furthermore, for businesses that want to create both a web application and a mobile app, the single-page app approach is the way forward.

We use React on the frontend for web applications and React Native for mobile apps. The best thing about React Native is that we only need one codebase (mostly) to create an iOS and Android app at the same time. There are 'hybrid' apps, where you also have one codebase, but the UI (user interface) is not native and the feel of the app can be quite different to native apps. With React Native we can build real mobile apps that are actually indistinguishable from native iOS and Android apps.

For backend systems, we use Django, a web framework written in the Python programming language. Django provides a toolkit for building secure, high-performance web applications: request routing, authentication, database interaction, validation etc. It is known for its large user and developer community, and its excellent documentation. It is used by organisations such as Instagram, Pinterest and National Geographic among others. We use Django REST framework to create web APIs for our mobile and JavaScript applications to communicate with.

We believe that the above stack is the best choice for delivering robust, maintainable web and mobile applications to tight deadlines. It has proven to be a stable and scalable set of technologies, and has a direct impact on the speed of our development and project delivery.