The TAB’s feedback on JavaScript front-end frameworks and TypeScript Front-end frameworks OCC has been experimenting with feature-rich JavaScript frameworks. One of the current forerunners is React, which we used in our Pegasus project to enable component-based dynamic web UI. For a new ContrOCC web project, we compared React to Vue.js, which is increasing in popularity and offers several advantages over React. However, although Vue.js does solve some of the issues we found using React on Pegasus, this does not outweigh[...]

The next generation of ASP.NET is on the horizon Back in August we ran a lunchtime miniconf video that introduced us to Blazor. It began as a proof of concept from ASP.NET team member Steve Sanderson, who saw an opportunity to run C# and .NET code natively in the browser by compiling it to WebAssembly – a highly performant, assembly-like language that runs alongside JavaScript. Back then he was using an old open-source project called DotNetAnywhere to provide access to[...]

A recent survey of social care directories found OCC’s MarketPlace offers one of the best user experiences for those seeking information and advice about care. Socitm, the society for IT practitioners in the public sector, carried out the survey in December 2017. It reviewed 152 council sites on a range of user experience criteria, including: how easy it was for a user to find the site content and presentation of information, including the clarity of headings and the relevance, continuity[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Articulate.js Articulate.js is a simple, free (MIT license) jQuery plugin that uses the Web Speech API to speak the content of a web page. This could be useful in a broad range of circumstances, but particularly as an assistive technology for those that have problems reading text on[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Xamarin & .NET Standard (Core) .NET Standard is now supported by Xamarin. The .Net Standard is the specification of which .NET APIs are available on all .NET runtimes – including the full framework, Core and now Xamarin. The upshot is that if you use a library or assembly[...]

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has begun to work with local government teams on transforming their online services to use some of the new technology developed by GDS for central government. So far, there have been 2 pilot projects across about 15 councils, focusing on parking permit and older person’s concessionary bus pass services. The aim has been to redevelop these services end-to-end using GDS expertise and the new GOV.UK Verify service. The interesting thing is that GDS has documented[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Security in the news Data breaches are on the rise and the media is increasingly publishing news stories on the subject. Some of the breaches happened years ago and are only just coming to light. For example, Yahoo had two hacks three years ago that have only recently[...]

The OCC Innovation Delivery teams – Fusion, Trilobites, Puffin and the OCC UX Design Studio – hold regular Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. Docker Compose [Fusion]​​ Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. Operando has lots of modules, each one being a Docker container and[...]

OCC Innovation Delivery hold fortnightly Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. IIS ​ARR (Application Request Routing)​​ Greg told us about his experience with ARR. This IIS component is required when you want to forward requests to another machine on a port that isn’t port 80. One of the settings is[...]

Last month Molly Watt gave a talk at UX Oxford ( ‘Is your window open to all?’ ) on accessibility and inclusive, mostly in digital environments on the web. .@MollyWattTalks starting her talk on accessibility at #uxoxford pic.twitter.com/ptHcumdFHl — UX Oxford (@UXOxford) January 12, 2017 Molly Watt is an inclusive technology evangelist and accessibility and usability consultant. She is also the co-founder of the Molly Watt trust, a charity raising awareness of Usher Syndrome. Molly has spoken at a number[...]

We use a number of tools to help us design products that meet accessibility standards. These are some of the tools we use to quickly test our software for conformance against common accessibility problems. Colour Contrast Analyser The colour contrast analyser from The Paciello Group helps designers determine the contrast of text and other visual elements. This allows us to determine the legibility of these elements, provides a pass/fail assessment against WCAG 2.0 colour contrast criteria and also simulates several[...]

OCC’s product development team is currently working on new web-based components to extend our existing ContrOCC product to provide specialist corporate finance functionality tailored to local authority requirements. Each new component is being written from the ground up, and we are taking the opportunity to review our technology choices even where we have some prior experience. A particular area of interest is document generation. Although our products are based on core financial, contract management, and case management features, each of[...]

Last month we had our Innovation Delivery hack day where the whole team had fun developing small projects outside of their usual everyday work. For our project we wanted to explore React JS, in particular creating a React JS table component and open-sourcing it. You can see the results here. We have recently started using React JS at Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) for a major redevelopment of our core social care finance product – called ContrOCC – that allows local[...]

A requirement we hear from many of our Government customers is that a sizable number of their users with sight impairment prefer to have a text size widget on-screen when they browse a website. These accessibility widgets are tough to implement cleanly using HTML and CSS but the advent of CSS preprocessors such as Sass and LESS make the job much easier. In this post we’ll see how we can use Sass to create a text size widget. What we’re[...]