A legacy PHP application is often the software equivalent of a building that has been extended a dozen times: it works, the business depends on it, and nobody wants to touch it. Old PHP versions, no tests, mixed concerns, and years of accumulated shortcuts make every change risky. The good news is that legacy PHP...
Software Development
Articles, guides and tutorials on software development, covering methodologies, tools, languages and best practices for building production-grade software.
Symfony and Laravel are the two dominant PHP frameworks, and both are excellent. They are also more similar than the “which is better” debates suggest: Laravel is actually built on top of several Symfony components. The real question is not which is superior in the abstract, but which fits your project, your team, and...
Building one desktop application that runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux from a single codebase is exactly what Qt was designed for. In 2026, Qt remains one of the strongest choices for building cross-platform desktop apps and embedded software, especially where performance, a native feel, and long-term...
Qt 6 is a major version, and migrating a real Qt 5 application to it is more than a recompile. The framework was modularised, the build system shifted toward CMake, some APIs were removed or replaced, and modules moved around. None of it is insurmountable, but a successful migration is planned, not stumbled into. This...
This is a developer-focused Claude API vs OpenAI API comparison of the two most widely used large language model APIs: Anthropic’s Claude API and OpenAI’s API. It is not about which chatbot feels smarter in casual use; it is about what matters when you are building software on top of them: integration, tool use,...
A general-purpose AI model knows a lot about the world and nothing about your business. It has never seen your product manuals, your internal policies, or last quarter’s reports. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the technique that closes that gap: it lets a model answer questions using your documents, accurately...
Calling the OpenAI API to get a reply is easy. Building an OpenAI API chatbot that is reliable, stays on topic, controls cost, and holds up under real users is the actual work. This guide walks through the architecture and the production concerns that separate a demo from something you can put in front of customers....
Mainframe modernisation is rarely a single decision. It is a choice between several distinct strategies, each with a very different cost, timeline, and risk profile, and the right answer depends on your business goals rather than on technology preference. Choosing “rewrite everything” when a replatform would do, or...
“How much will it cost to move off COBOL?” is the first question every board asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on more than the size of the codebase. This guide breaks down what actually drives the cost of a COBOL migration in the UK, realistic budget and timeline ranges, and the risks that turn a...
Rust is an increasingly popular COBOL migration target for organisations that want both memory safety and high performance without a garbage collector. For safety-critical and performance-sensitive systems, its guarantees are compelling: whole classes of memory bugs are caught at compile time, and the resulting...