March 2014 - Web and Mobile App Development | Custom Application Development Company

Data-Warehousing for Small & Medium Organizations

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Jay

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – by the Chinese philosopher Laozi

Most of the people have heard about the data warehousing but they donot have fair idea about what exactly is achieved by doing this. As a business owner, whether you need it. You can be in a better position to take a decision once you know the power of Business Intelligence & Dataware-housing.

Let’s say you are a small/mid-sized organization, and you want to have some reports to have in-depth view about how your business is doing. There may be any or some of the reasons below:

1. Does the concern person in your organization struggle every month to produce the revenue/sales reports as desired?

2. Do you have your top management team spend their valuable time for analyzing business progresses to come up with meaningful reports involving figures & charts?

3. Does it take repeated manual effort using spreadsheet for building the report for analysis for getting a picture of your organization’s performance?

If your answer is “yes” to any or some of the above questions or your data querying looks like the above image then, it is the time to consider about the better process for obtaining business reports.

And believe it or not, to build a data warehousing it is not very expensive as you might have heard about.

A perfect case-study for a Data-Warehouse

What is a DWH or data-warehouse? Generally, a Data Warehouse is a randomly accessible reliable source of data for generating information in a business system and serve the analytical needs of the organization.

Objective of a Data Warehouse:

To serve as the company’s principal source of information for business planning and decision making.
To have a central and secure source of all business information.
It is essential for those who have a “need to know” how to make information readily available.
To store Business Information in a secure, reliable, and randomly retrievable form.

Small and Medium organizations should consider whether you’ve defined your reporting needs carefully enough to really take advantage of a data warehouse.

1. Are you sure you’re able to do everything using your existing systems?

2. Have you thought about the dashboards, daily, weekly and monthly reports that could help executives and staffs?

3. Do You have any idea how your organization is performing?

If not, it makes sense to start righaway!.

For small and medium organization which having more than 50 staff, a well thought for implementing the data warehouse and reporting strategy. It is an interesting option as well as robust and often powerful way to support the organizational reporting and analysis.

Successful Outcomes for Small and Medium Organizations

Andolasoft is a 5+ yrs old Software Development company. Here we focus on Business Intelligence(BI) development. In fact, the maiden customer of our company awarded us Pentaho project, since then we never looked back and till today have customers in 8 countries.

Andolasoft works in an association to your company and help you achieve your business goals faster and in a cost effective way.

Well-designed data-warehouse needs to deliver the new functionality at regular interval, so that the organization realize the benefits.

In one example, Andolasoft implemented many data-warehouse solutions using Mysql for retail services, medical organization, who used the solution to understand and subsequently increase the profitability of their projects.

Call us on +1 (408) 625-7188 or email us to get in touch and learn how Andolasoft can help your organization suffering from reliable reporting issues.

3 Reasons Why future Web Design be Responsive

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Jay

Responsive Web Design is an approach of laying out a website such that the website provides an optimal viewing experience — ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices and screen sizes(from desktop computer to mobile devices).
The designer creating a Responsive Design should ensure that the website’s navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images, audio/video players and other UI elements re-adjust themselves on a variety of devices. Thus, one need not spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one “mobile version” and another “desktop version” of the website.

Now, having understood what is Responsive Web Design, let us understand why Responsive Design is important while creating websites.

Mobile Usage is Exploding like never before
According to a Morgan Stanley report, Mobile internet usage is expected to cross over desktop usage by 2014.
- Over 20% of Google searches are being performed on a mobile device.
- One half of local searches are made on mobile devices
- 86% of mobile users are using mobile devices while watching tv
- 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience
- In the United States, 27% of internet users only access the internet on a mobile device
Responsive Adapts to Diverse Devices and Screen size
As smartphone and tablet adoption rapidly increases, so does the importance of mobile-friendly website.

One of the most appealing aspects of responsive web design is that a responsive website can provide a great user experience across many devices and screen sizes. This is an important characteristic, since it is impossible to anticipate all the devices and screen sizes searchers will use to access your site. A site that works well regardless of these variables will provide a better and more consistent user-experience than a separate mobile site that is designed for a specific device and screen size.
Responsive Design is Preferred for SEO/Digital Marketing
In June 2012 at SMX Advanced, Google’s Pierre Farr went on record to declare that Google prefers responsive web design over mobile templates. Having one single URL makes it easier for Google bot to crawl site, Google’s external link algorithm and reduces the chance of on-page SEO issues. For all these reasons, responsive sites typically perform better and are easier to maintain than a separate, mobile template site.

If SEO is part of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile–friendly website is becoming essential. Also in order to have separate desktop and mobile site requires need to have separate SEO campaigns. Managing one site and one SEO campaign is far easier than managing 2 sites with equal number of campaigns. This is a key advantage a responsive website has over a separate mobile site.

Andolasoft has expertise in designing responsive websites. Check out some of our free responsive web templates.

Like this blog? I’d love to hear about your thoughts on this. Thanks for sharing your comments.

Download responsive Web Templates for FREE

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Jay

We at Andolasoft are delighted to release a collection of responsive web templates for free usage. You can download and use them absolutely FREE (We don’t ask for any Credit Card) for your website. These web templates are fully responsive such that even a mobile reader gets best user experience. You can download free templates/themes by visiting following links: https://www.andolasoft.com/ebook/

It is true that to create a website you need to have lot of skills and energy. If you are not so good with HTML, CSS or web designing, our website templates will be perfect solution for you. We can provide you the HTML of the template you are interested with.

We’re sure you will find these templates useful regardless if you’re a newbie or a pro webmaster. However, you are free to alter templates to suit your needs and apply to your personal or commercial websites without any restriction.

What are you waiting for? Go and get from the pool:

You can checkout some of our cool free apps. Feel free to share your opinions in the comments section below:

Hash Class: Makes CakePHP Coding easier!

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Prakash S.

Hash is a predefined class provided by CakePHP. It is used for array manipulation such as inserting an element to an array, remove an element from an array, sort an array, extract part of a large array, filter the non empty elements, rearrange the whole array, which makes the code more optimized and understandable. So it makes CakePHP easier and flexible to use. Because most of the operations like find, insert, update in CakePHP returns/takes array as output/input.

Hash provides an improved interface, more consistent and predictable set of features over Set. While it lacks the spotty support for pseudo XPath, its more fully featured dot notation provides similar features in a more consistent implementation.

Operations performed by Hash class:

extract()
combine()
filter()
check()
insert()
remove()
sort()
and many more…

Some Important Tips:

{n} – Match any numeric key.
{s} – Match any string value and numeric string values.
[id] – Matches elements with a given array key.
[id=2] – Matches elements with id equal to 2.
[id!=2] – Matches elements with id not equal to 2.
[id<=2] – Matches elements with id less than or equal to 2.

– Matches elements that have values matching the regular expression inside.

Hash::extract(array $data, $path):

Retrieve required data from array. You do not have to loop through the array.

Ex: // Common Usage:

$users = $this->User->find("all");
 $results = Hash::extract($user, '{n}.User.id');
 // $results equals:
 // array(1,2,3,4,5,...);

Hash::insert(array $data, $path, $values = null):

Insert sub-array’s into the original array.

Ex:

$temp = array(
 'page' => array('name' => 'page')
);
$result = Hash::insert($temp, 'file', array('name' => 'files'));
// $result now looks like:
Array
(
 [page] => Array
 (
 [name] => page
 )
 [file] => Array
 (
 [name] => files
 )
)

Hash::remove(array $data, $path = null):

Remove data from any path specified.

EX:

$arr_test = array(
 'page' => array('name' => 'page'),
 'file' => array('name' => 'files')
);
$result = Hash::remove($arr_test, 'file');
/* $result now looks like:
 Array
 (
 [page] => Array
 (
 [name] => page
 )
 
)
*/

Hash::combine(array $data, $keyPath = null, $valuePath = null, $groupPath = null)

Combine the results to form a new array of expected result. Helpful in case, where we are displaying data in the form of select box. Like categories, states, city etc. We don’t have to retrieve the data separately. We can find the required data from the original result set retrieved, containing the information..

Ex:

$arr_test = array(
 array(
 'User' => array(
 'id' => 2,
 'group_id' => 1,
 'Data' => array(
 'user' => 'John.doe',
 'name' => 'Matt Lee'
 )
 )
 ),
 array(
 'User' => array(
 'id' => 14,
 'group_id' => 2,
 'Data' => array(
 'user' => 'phpunt',
 'name' => 'Jack'
 )
 )
 ),
);
 
$result = Hash::combine($arr_test, '{n}.User.id', '{n}.User.Data');
/* $result now looks like below:
 Array
 (
 [2] => Array
 (
 [user] => John.doe
 [name] => Matt Lee
 )
 [14] => Array
 (
 [user] => phpunt
 [name] => Jack
 )
 )
*/

Hash::check(array $data, string $path = null)
Check whether an element exists in the array or not.

Ex:

$set = array(
 'My Index' => array('First' => 'The first item1')
);
$result = Hash::check($set, 'My Index.First');
// $result == True

Hash::filter(array $data, $callback = array(‘Hash ‘, ‘Filter’)):

Keep only non-empty elements and filter the empty elements.
Ex:

$data_arr = array(
 '0',
 false,
 true,
 0,
 array('test', 'is you own', false)
);
$result = Hash::filter($data_arr);
 
/* Out put:
 Array (
 [0] => 0
 [2] => true
 [3] => 0
 [4] => Array
 (
 [0] => one thing
 [2] => is you own
 )
 )
*/

Hash::sort(array $data, $path, $dir, $type = ‘regular’)

Sort an array according to the path, direction and type provided.

Ex:

$arr_test = array(
 0 => array('Person' => array('name' => 'Jeff1')),
 1 => array('Shirt' => array('color' => 'black1'))
);
$result = Hash::sort($arr_test, '{n}.Person.name', 'asc');
/* $result now looks like:
 Array
 (
 [0] => Array
 (
 [Shirt] => Array
 (
 [color] => black1
 )
 )
 [1] => Array
 (
 [Person] => Array
 (
 [name] => Jeff1
 )
 )
 )
*/

$type can be of the following type:

regular
numeric
string
natural(ex. Will sort fooo10 below fooo2 as an example)

$dirc can be of two type asc & desc

For more information refer: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/hash.html

However if you want you can hire or get free consultation from our experienced CakePHP developers.

Read More: Password Hashing API in PHP

Have I missed out anything? Comment at end of this topic.

Apple’s iBeacon scores over NFC

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Jay

iBeacon is a new technology developed by Apple for its operating system iOS7. This technology allows mobile apps to detect when an iPhone is near a small wireless sensor called a beacon. The Beacon can transmit Push Notifications to an iPhone and vice versa using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).They can also be used by the Android operating system.

Advantages of iBeacon:

Compatibility: Most of the mobile phones are compatible with Bluetooth.
Range: Range of the iBeacon is upto 50 meters.
Low power consumption: It consumes less minuscule amounts of energy and allows device batteries to last longer.

Where we use iBeacon?

You can track your locations both indoors and outside
Get discounts, coupons, special offers from stores as you just pass by.
Provide the right context to determine directions to what you really need – office in a building, store in the mall, nearest exit
Allow for mobile-payment platforms to pay automatically when you leave the store

Why iBeacon become NFC competitor?

Here, I have discussed the major reasons why Apple’s iBeacon Might Kill NFC:

Range:
https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa/wo/0.0.9.3.5.2.1.1.3.1.1
NFC only works in close proximity and its range up to 8 inches, whereas iBeacon’s range is up to 50 meters. NFC-enabled devices require an NFC chip to transmit data, whereas iBeacon requires only iPhone support BLE.

Availability:
BLE is available in almost every smartphone devices on the market, however not every phone comes provided with a NFC chip.

Cost-effectiveness:
iBeacon is a Bluetooth technology which is inbuilt in pretty much 100% of smartphone devices, so from customer perspective it’s cost is zero. Whereas we need to buy an additional NFC chip for mobile devices.

Affordability:
iBeacons are slightly more expensive than NFC chips. But, iBeacon is more affordable and its range is up to 50 meters. So, we need one beacon for a 1,700 square feet store and its estimated comes $99 (Estimate is currently offering pre-orders of three beacons for $99). If you would like to use NFC for the same area, you need around 10-cent NFC tags for each product of the store and it would cost you around $100,000 for 1 million product.

Apple has found a smart way to wirelessly transmit data over short distances using BLE. BLE can solve these micro-location data challenges in ways that NFC can’t duplicate. iBeacon is a promising step towards a very important and lucrative industry and coupled with fingerprint technology for privacy and security. The technology is currently used in retail, healthcare industry and education sector.

SEE ALSO: Useful features of iOS 7

Want add to this topic? Comment here.