Method

Our preferred development approach is best described as ‘Evolutionary Prototyping’. This approach has worked well in the major developments that we have achieved in Gibraltar. A key item in this method is that you nominate the individuals who can be involved in the development process, make decisions as and when required and go on to support the users in-house.

Sage Retrieve

Our tried and tested method is to use the Sage Retrieve environment which is basically an advanced form of COBOL. All our large systems have been developed this way. It allows for a very fast and flexible development to take place and gives us complete control over all aspects of the application including the lowest level of data file repair. This language is in use in many hundreds of Sage Development Centres in the UK and by tens of thousands of Line 100 end users. Systech is the only Sage Development Centre in Gibraltar.

The resulting applications are not resource hungry and will run satisfactorily on 486 or even 386 computers. It will work with any file server that supports Novell or Microsoft record locking.

We have 4 programmers in this environment and have a proven track record in its use. We have produced some of the largest mission critical applications in Gibraltar for Toyota, Lyonnaise des Eaux, CEPSA (Gib) and the Gibraltar Government.

The Retrieve language is fully supported and regularly expanded by Sage who have a large client and dealer user base.

Visual Basic

Our PayPlus payroll product is written in Visual Basic which provides a very powerful Windows development environment when used with an SQL database engine such as DB2, SQL Server or Oracle. Here the retrieval of single or groups of records is controlled by the database engine not by the programming language which simply ‘requests’ the data. This system has a number of theoretical advantages by isolating the data from the application language which simplifies data management and allows a number of compatible development languages to share data.

Warranty

The indefinite warranty covers all reproducible faults including Year 2000 non-compliance.