Best Open Source Rapid Application Development Toolkit 2024 Radicore is an open source rapid application development, or RAD, toolkit used for building administrative web applications, which are platform independent, browser independent, and database independent. Its name being a combination of RAD and Core, Radicore can be used as the heart of a myriad of applications, such as workflow, role based access control, audit logging, and data dictionary management. It is a versatile framework designed to support these functionalities, making it a robust choice when building comprehensive administrative web applications. As Radicore is named in The Developer Awards 2024, we speak with Tony Marston, its Founder and Director. Tony Marston is a top-class web developer, renowned as the author of his open source PHP framework, Radicore. Before we dive into the great successes Tony has seen through Radicore, we are going to take a closer look at his journey to excellence. In the early days of working on COBOL projects, Tony did not have a central library of reusable code to help him achieve higher rates of productivity. As he began to notice repeating patterns, he maintained a personal collection of code snippets that he could copy and paste into new programs, using his innovation to boost his productivity and drive results. In the mid-1980s, Tony’s path to success began whilst working on a project. His client asked him on the Friday afternoon to enable his application to include Role Based Access Control, and by the Sunday afternoon Tony had designed a database to hold data for users, transactions, roles, permissions, and menus. He began to code the software on the Monday, and by Friday it was up and running. The project was regarded a great success, and as Tony had not limited the design to only work with the first application, it was quickly adopted as the company standard for all future applications. By providing the RBAC software with the ability to control the running of all application components, Tony had succeeded in turning his personal library into a fully-fledged framework. In the 1990s, the company switched from COBOL to Uniface, which saw Tony rebuilding that framework in the new language. Once again, this framework provided the standard functionality that was required in every application, further demonstrating its aid to boosting productivity levels. Not too long after, in late 1999, Tony joined a new company that needed help implementing its design for a web application. Although the application used all Sep24362 the correct buzzwords, its design wasn’t cost effective and was cancelled before leaving the prototyping phase. It was this moment that Tony decided to branch out on his own, removing his association with developers incapable of putting theory into practice. He wanted to use a language that had been purpose built for the development of web applications and finalised on PHP, a decision that he has never come to regret. Tony began by building a small prototype application that proved his capabilities of writing effective code using the OO concepts of encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. Leveraging his previous experience, Tony built it around Three-Tier Architecture and built all web pages using a templating engine based on XML and XSL stylesheets. Instead of a large program that could handle multiple tasks for a single database table, he built smaller programs, each of which handled a single task for one or two tables. He published this prototype application on his personal website in 2003, alongside several articles discussing his methodology. Following this, Tony rebuilt his RBAC database using MySQL before redeveloping all the code in PHP. Tony founded Radicore Software Limited in January 2004 to market the development framework he had designed and built to aid in the development of web-based enterprise applications, which are also known as administrative web applications. These applications are primarily used by both large and small corporations to record business activities, including sales order processing, supply chain management, invoicing, accounting, stock control and inventory, shipments, enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management. Such systems are responsible for the capturing and processing of large amounts of data, characterised by having electronic forms at the front end, a relational database at the back end, and software in the middle to handle the business rules. Tony released this development framework as open source in 2006 so that developers could utilise it to build their own applications. Alongside this, however, Tony also offers training services and bespoke development for those with less experience in web development. In 2006, Tony released his codebase as open source and was contacted by a small design agency shortly after, who wanted a back-office application built for one of their clients using Tony’s RBAC ideas. He was subcontracted to build this bespoke application, completing the project on-time and within budget. Both the client and the agency were so impressed with Tony’s expertise that the agency went on to ask Tony to help with similar projects for other clients. This time, instead of a separate bespoke application for each client, they asked Tony to build a package that could be used by multiple clients. “I was up for the challenge,” Tony recalls, “so in January 2007, I started with some industrial-strength database designs from Len Silverston’s Data Model Resource Book, and in six months I had produced a prototype that used six of his designs. It took a further six months to convert the customer’s existing website to use the new database and to insert the business rules into the class files, and in 2008 it went live under the name TRANSIX.” In 2014, Tony was contacted by a director of a company with ties to the USA and the Far East. This company had used his framework to build a bespoke application of their own. During their conversation, Tony mentioned TRANSIX, which intrigued the director so much that he flew into London to receive a demonstration. Shortly after, the two formed a partnership so that the
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