Never Too Small for Web Apps Web Application WAMP Stacks Project Spotlight IRSReporting.com

We engaged Ethix Systems and received excellent service . . . in creating our web site, conveying the information that we provided to them and building the complicated web logic necessary to create the Tax Forms from the information provided. They worked well with the complicated nuances of the tax forms and responded quickly to requests for changes. Thanks for the great work Dan and Nick.

Michael Lloyd
Williams Coulson, Attorneys at Law

Vision: Williams Coulson is a law firm that provides estate, taxation, retirement, and business planning services for clients throughout the United States.

Problem: A number of participants in an IRS program are now required to fill out an IRS Form 8886. These individuals are likely unaware of the consequences of not filing the form, and would not know how to file it. Furthermore, it would be expensive to engage a law firm on an individual basis to have this form completed.

Solution: Ethix Systems developed an online program that allows individuals to log in and provide all necessary information for the IRS form. The program then automatically fills out the forms for their clients, using FPDF libraries. This streamlines the filing process, allowing Williams Coulson to process many forms quickly and inexpensively.
There are great advantages to using web programming languages when building applications. They are versatile, easy to maintain, only require a web browser to run, and don't cost any more to develop than an installed application. However, these applications require both a client machine and a server, which has been traditionally limited to a network or internet setting.
There are now applications known as "WAMP stacks" that allow someone to run Apache, PHP, and MySQL from a single Windows workstation without having to purchase extra hardware that may not even be needed depending on how complicated the application is.
Two of these programs are called WAMP Server and Server2Go. WAMP Server allows you to use any workstation as a "server," even the client machine itself. This is very useful for building a web application for a growing business that has only a single computer. At first the application can be used with WAMP Server, and down the road it can be migrated to a real server without any additional development costs. By running an enterprise class application from day one, a business can grow without incurring migration costs or learning curves in the future by having to switch applications.
Server2Go is very similar to WAMP Server, but runs off of removable media, such as a CD or a flash drive. This allows web applications to be easily distributed via more traditional application methods. This would also work perfectly in an environment where users don't have network or internet access. They could use the application anywhere, storing the information locally on the Server2Go database, and once they get back to the office, the application would synchronize with the real database.