Location: Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
Business sector:
website: www.chillisoft.co.za
Description
Chillisoft Solutions is a software development company that specialises in creating custom applications for business and industry. Chillisoft are also the developers of Habanero, a free open source Enterprise Application Framework that uses object relational mapping and runtime user interface generation to provide the groundwork for creating agile business applications.
Usage of Firebird
Chillisoft have focused on Firebird for two reasons. Firstly, the embedded database provides a simple installation of a client package where there is no network and spread of users. A classic installation site for this kind of application would be a hair salon that uses one of Chillisoft’s custom applications to manage appointments and send SMS/text reminders to customers according to stored appointment times.
Chillisoft’s second big focus is the development of the Habanero framework, which uses object relational mapping (ORM) to abstract the domain model layer away from the relational database. This approach provides the means to support a variety of databases, and the Habanero community showed a clear interest in Habanero support for Firebird databases. This support entails persistence of data to and from the database, as well as the ability to reverse engineer a class design from an existing Firebird database.
Why we use Firebird
The possibility of installing an embedded database file with a simple client installation was of significant interest to us at Chillisoft. While alternative database vendors would have required manual support from our installation team, providing an embedded database allowed us to give an installation CD to a client without our having to be involved at the site. As for Habanero, there was no doubt that with significant support for Firebird in the development community, the Habanero framework would not have been able to compete on level footing without supporting these users.