xAppOS Software Platform
The xAppOS (pronounced "zapp-oh-ess") software platform was created by The Digital Orchard to serve as the foundation for our website, application, and database development. This platform supercharges our development efforts, enabling us to get up and running with your website, application or database quickly, without any delays. We can focus on your specific business needs and have a finished product ready for you to use in a relatively short amount of time.
Over the past several years, we've been painstakingly working on adding new features to xAppOS while keeping performance and reliability optimal for our clients. In order to achieve this, xAppOS has been designed to be "modular" in that features and functionality are added by way of applications, hence the "App" in its name. This allows a vast array of features to be available to xAppOS without becoming slow or bloated because only those applications needed at any given moment are loaded.
xAppOS brings many unique and powerful features and advantages to the table.
RAD Applications & Databases
RAD, or Rapid Application Development, allows us to very quickly get up to speed with a new software project because large parts of the programming and functionality are already built-into the platform in the form of libraries, other applications, and support for third-party utilities. For example, email functionality is provided by the PostOffice application, so this never needs to be reimplemented on a per-project basis.
Background Processing
xAppOS has a built-in Events processing system that allows any application to schedule background tasks to be performed at any time without impacting the performance of the application or website for end users. A single "heartbeat' drives the entire system. With full support for crontab scheduling of tasks, the Events system brings universal background proessing of tasks to every application built on the xAppOS platform.
Intelligent Synchronization of Contact Information
One of the recently-completed features of xAppOS, and one of its most powerful features, is synchronization of contact information across any application. Our design philosopy for xAppOS is that each application should be able to function with minimal dependencies on other applications. Quite often, an application will need to store contact information, such as phone numbers, email addresses and so on for people and businesses. When using several applications, you don't want to enter the same information separately into each application that needs it, so xAppOS supports effortless synchronization of such contact information. Once information has been entered into one application, it is instantly available to every other application that needs it. Simply type the name of a previously-entered contact, select the best match, and all of their contact information is instantly pulled into the application. From that point forward, any changes made are synchronized across all applications sharing that contact. It's a beautiful thing.
Data Security & Versioning
xAppOS provides industry-standard encryption of database records on a per-table basis. Yes, you read that right - entire records can be encrypted, providing peace-of-mind that your data is safe should it fall into the wrong hands.
For added peace-of-mind, xAppOS allows any database table to maintain snapshots of record changes and even shows who made the changes and when they were made. This allows past versions of records to be restored should something be deleted by mistake or become corrupted.
Data Liberation (Exporting) — It's Your Data, After All!
As of April 2014, xAppOS has been enhanced with the ability to export any data set into a format that can be imported into other systems by a skilled developer. We chose the JSON data-interchange format because it beautifully handled the complex and deeply-nested nature of our data modeling system. Any skilled developer can work with the exported data to move it into other systems. This new export feature also takes steps to ensuring that any sensitive information in your database is protected during the export process. By way of password-based encryption, the data is exported to a file that only you can open with the right set of keys.