Draconis Software Blog

Interested in starting your own company? It’s not as complicated as it may seem. Here’s an interesting link that should point you in the right direction (at least for filing the forms for a Limited Liability Company – a popular entity type for tech companies, and the one that we use for Draconis Software).

Something else to think about: several sites exist that can fill out and even file the forms for you (BizFilings.com is one). Just make sure you know what you’re getting into: choosing an entity type and correctly filling out the forms is rather important.

One of the most difficult parts of writing complex, AJAX-enabled web applications is maintaining state throughout the user experience. Since, by nature, AJAX gives us the ability to do completely unstructured navigation with real-time changes, maintaining state has become increasingly complex.

Recently, I was working on an AJAX-aware process where the user would select from a set of criteria for searching system inventory in a future version of RSP. The tool is designed to allow systems administrators and managers to quickly compare hardware configurations (along with other hardware-related features). In setting the criteria, the user was changing the way a table of hardware configurations was appearing, all in real-time on the same page. One of the difficulties was keeping the state of the user-chosen criteria consistent between page updates.

The solution I came up with was to generate a “state” in Javascript whenever the user changes their set of criteria, then “serialize” this state into a string suitable for POST’ing to the backend (where it’s processed by a Java controller).

(Read the article)

To all you father’s out there, today is the day to kick back, relax, and have your kids do the yard work.  And be sure to check out Engadget’s list of Father’s Day gifts, just in case you forgot….

I thought a good way to start off the Draconis Software Blog would be to give a story of who we are and how we got here. Like most small businesses, we’ve learned as we’ve gone along and had our share of triumphs and mistakes.Draconis Software started over 5 years ago without a company or really much of a plan. Myself (Costa) and Ryan had grown a fairly large computer network, but had no good way to keep track of the machines until it was too late and a problem developed. We thought it might be nice to write a small program that could run on the machines and collect statistics like CPU, memory, and disk usage, and then report back to a central machine to display a summary on a monitor.

As we started development, we kept thinking of more and more features we could add on to the program. Why not make it save the information in a database and provide graphs of past performance? And make it cross-platform? And allow users to write their own plugins?

At a certain point, we had to draw the line somewhere and pick which features we were going to finish for the 1.0 release, and which ones were just going to have to wait until later. Even so, in retrospect, I think we waited too long before our first release; I’ve learned that the axiom of “release early, release often” is very important for small software startups. While there’s a valid drive to make the first release perfect and filled with new ideas, this can become so difficult and time consuming that the release never happens. In addition, since software startups are usually understaffed, this process can take even longer. By having a stable, fully tested (albeit scaled down) initial release, you can slowly grow a client base and be sure that each new release has even more useful features for your market.

(Read the article)

The founders, Costa and Ryan, have set up this blog as a medium to share our thoughts and opinions on current technology trends, interesting development information, and entrepreneurial information.

We’re two tech entrepreneurs who founded Draconis Software three years ago to develop and sell our network monitoring/management software, RSP. Over the years, we’ve realized there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on around us that we’d like to share with you. Hopefully you’ll be able to pull something interesting out.

Some of things we’re most interested in are Web 2.0 technologies and start-up information (i.e. how to create your own company), and we’re hoping to keep a steady stream of this info coming.

So enjoy! And be sure to let us know what you think.