Every new year some of the work from the previous year spills over and keeps us busy for at least a couple more weeks. The year 2012 started slow and clumsy at first, but it turned out to be a very productive and fruitful year for us.

We had 4 Anahita birth release of 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2. This project has grown quite a bit during the last year. If you don’t know about the Anahita project, it is a developer friendly social networking platform and framework that provides you a lot of the design patterns used for developing custom social networking apps and services using a correct nodes-graphs-stories architecture.

The improvements from Anahita 1.5 to the current release 2.2.3 are very prominent. Anahita is still a young project. By the end of 2013 we are aiming to have a codebase that is mostly native code and completely Joomla free as well as new social features that need to be available at the framework level for all the apps to use such as: global graph search, folksonomy, sharing, mentions, geolocations, and mobile accessibility. I can go on and on about the Anahita project, because it is our life project and part of our world liberation plan.

Another highlight of last year is the fact that we started to develop Android mobile apps as well as iphone and ipad. Our projects are now more focused on building location, communication, and social networking apps as well as custom scientific tools and calculators. We still do not accept mobile games. Sorry, but developing games requires a completely different skill set and project management workflow. We have also become a lot more meticulous about accepting projects from the “idea people” and startups.

Our client list is continuing to grow, thank you so much for all your business. We are now ready to take on 2013 with many more exciting projects and of course continue taking the Anahita project to a whole new level as the best social networking infrastructure technology there is.

At least by the contemporary context of Witchcraft, programming involves putting down mathematic symbols, alphabets, and characters that influence the forces of universe. This craft can be used for both good evil.

Today software is powering the world. Everywhere from communication, transportation, medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture, software is playing a very important role. Software is what telling the inanimate machines and silicon chips to come alive and do things or create virtual realities with unlimited possibilities. When hackers and developers have been putting together code to create blogs, wikis, and social networks, they had little knowledge that their creations could lead to fundamental social and cultural changes to the point that powerful governments and corporations would go under and new ones would arise.

Software is made out of many programs. A program is made out of lines of symbols, characters, and numbers. They are the spells that manipulate the forces of universe. Coding is the new Witchcraft and hackers are the wizards and witches who manipulate and exploit the forces of good and evil, the yin and yang, in our everyday world.

One common mistake that a lot of our prospective clients make is not realizing that their mobile app projects are often software as services delivered on the mobile platform. In this model the mobile app is mostly acting as a client that connects to the service.

Some good examples are the apps for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Paypal, Netflix, Path, Pinterest and so on. Most of these services are available via desktop and mobile browsers while they also provide applications developed using native OS environment such as iOS or Android where users can access all or some aspects those services. Some of these services are only available through mobile apps. For example: Instagram and Path.

When it gets to mobile services, most of the work is actually happening on the server side. That means a server application on the cloud becomes the brain of the system to which all the different mobile and desktop apps (Clients) connect to.

Some entrepreneurs, by mistake, call the server side the “database”. Yes, the server application does in fact use a database in a lot of cases, however most of the logic, communication, and data management happens through the server application. Building mobile services requires both mobile and web software development knowledge and skill sets.

Such services are eventually aiming to serve millions of people. In the beginning, these systems are often developed in smaller scales for a smaller group of users  and then in many iterative stages grown and scaled up until they can serve a very large user base. This also means these projects require round the clock attention for maintenance, community management, marketing, etc. They also require lots of experimentation and modifications until a lot of people would want to use them. That is why an entrepreneur cannot just hire a software company to build an entire system and deliver it on a certain time and date.

These types of projects are better done as startup companies where technical founders, co-founders, or dedicated software teams babysit their projects until they grow and thrive. In the mean time outside software companies can supply infrastructure technologies and consulting services to help these startups save significant amount of time and financial resources.

Depending on the complexity and nature of the mobile service, different types of web application technologies can be used to develop the server side. Some of the existing technologies are as following:

1. Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
2. Social Networking platforms and frameworks: Anahita
3. Software Development Frameworks: Anahita, Nooku, Ruby On Rails, or other MVC frameworks

It is often a challenge to find software companies who are willing to develop both the server and clients side for a mobile server. Many of the mobile app developers in the market are not so keen on developing server side software and many web application developers are still testing the waters in the iOS and Android environment. Some entrepreneurs try to find separate mobile and web application developers, hoping that these people may spark enough chemistry to work together, however in our experience we yet have to see some impressive results.

Questions? Comments? Woud like to know what you think. Please post them as comments.

Last week Ash and I were interviewed on the BobBloom podcast show from the www.southlasallemedia.com  and we talked about the Anahita Social Networking Engine project and how Anahitapolis.com has become an environment for Hackers, Entrepreneurs, and Hackerpreneurs to build and launch their business or hobby projects using the open source infrastructure that we are providing.

We also discuss how the new generation of hackers and developers who have become entrepreneurs are the very competitive forces in technology market.

You can listen to the podcast here: Hackerprenomics with Rastin and Ash

We would like to thank Bob for having us on his show. BobBloom is a technologist, consultant, developer, and podcaster in Toronto, Canada. He produces shows about Joomla and Nooku Framework from the perspective of consultants and developers with an eye on the business side. You can visit his website www.southlasallemedia.com and follow him on twitter @BobBloom

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