About équIT

équIT is a software design and development organisation established in 2005. It specialises in providing bespoke solutions for charities, NGOs, small/home traders and individuals at prices that suit those whose budgets are better spent elsewhere.

équIT uses open standards and open source software. These provide robust and future-proof solutions, and liberate you from single-provider lock-in.

We write solutions that follow published standards and established best practice so that you are free to make your own choices about your desktop software. (See the standards section for more details.)

Who is équit?

équIT is the software development brand of Darren Edale, a freelance developer of applications and databases for desktop, web and mobile.

I graduated from Cardiff University with an MA in Critical Theory, but have always been somewhat obsessed with getting computers to do useful things. After working as an analyst and programmer with IBM for several years, I decided to go freelance and specialise in creating web solutions. I have a long-standing interest in the use of open standards and open-source software as an effective means of access to quality IT for small or financially-constrained organisations and individuals.

I'm interested in working in an ethical and honest fashion. This is what drives my commitment to open standards and realistic, affordable pricing. I don't upsell, I provide honest advice based on evidence and experience of how to get the best out of IT.

I'm happy to discuss projects of any size.

What we do

Web apps

The skill set of équit revolves around use of proven and widely-deployed open-source software for providing web-based applications:

• Linux. The open-source operating system hosts all the software to provide a web site or application, including the webserver, database server and application interpreter.
• NGinx. The open-source webserver provides secure access to the pages in your web site or application. It has been gaining ground on Apache, the current leader in market-share for installed webservers on the internet, and is known for its minimal use of system resources and its performance. We also have the Apache webserver available if that is more suitable for your needs.
• MySQL. For web applications, we use the almost ubiquitous open-source database server for data storage. MySQL is the most-used database for internet applications. We also have MariaDB and PostgreSQL available or, for much lighter work, SQLite.
• PHP. For web applications, the latest version of the open-source general-purpose programming language provides the glue that links the webserver with the data, retrieving information from your database and generating the pages for your web application on-demand.

équIT can analyse your requirements, design a database that meets your data capture and retrieval needs, design and implement a PHP application to provide a web-based user-interface to your data, and to administer the server on which your application is hosted. We can provide hosting on our own server for your application, or can install and remotely administer an application on your own servers (via a secure, encrypted connection).

Web standards and best practice

All the sites developed by équIT follow standards established by w3c, the non-profit organisation that looks after the web. All our sites are HTML compliant, using CSS3. This means that the sites should work correctly on the widest range of modern browsers.

Clients

Here are some descriptions of some of my projects. You can click on the images to enlarge them.

Anthropological Index Online (AIO)

The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) runs a website that aids anthropologists' research. It has a team of academics who index articles from various journals in the field, making the results available to researchers online. The AIO site is effectively a search engine that points researchers in the direction of articles that may be of interest to them.

The online index suffered serious problems in 2012 and was unavailable for several months, at a time when the only person with knowledge of the system was also unavailable. In 2014 the RAI contacted me to help resurrect the system. It quickly became apparent that the system's problems were extensive, and that actually a ground-up rewrite using modern tools and technologies was the best solution.

The database of 500,000 articles and 3.25 million related keywords had to be fully reconstructed from the original Refer-format text files dating back several decades. The AIO was rewritten using modern PHP with a MySQL database. The application is modular and object-oriented, with an extensible plugin architecture based on équIT's in-house rapid development framework. The application provides end-user search facilities, including the ability to download or email search results in a variety of academic formats (e.g. for import into EndNote) as well as human-readable formats (e.g. HTML, PDF). It also provides the RAI's team of academics with a secure back-office interface enabling them to upload the details of new articles to the database as indexing progresses.

As well as development, the RAI needed ongoing maintenance of their new solution to avoid repeating the issues of the past. So a significant part of the solution for the new AIO is backup and maintenance, along with full system documentation, which ensures that the system is not dependent upon the continued availability of équIT. A simple disaster recovery plan was put in place to ensure that the RAI always has the latest system code and data, and the documentation it needs, to get AIO back up-and-running within hours, should the need arise. That said, the system has now been running successfully since the start of 2015 with no problems, and new features continue to be added.

Search the AIO.

Shine With Play

Shine is a new play therapy service set up by Maddie Powell in late 2017, aiming to help children and families work through issues at their own pace. Maddie wanted a simple, modern website with a light, spacious theme, to which she could direct potential clients, containing basic details of the service she offers along with a means of contacting her.

Shine website