We assisted Dell on "Frictionless"– the back-end system that generates Dell’s On-Line Store.

The product was a plugin-based architecture and made heavy use of COM, COM+, ATL and XML (using the Microsoft DOM), with plugins implemented in any COM-compliant language, in this case Visual C++ and Visual Basic.
We worked on maintaining and extending the project framework and also on key areas in some of the plugins, including COM, XML and GUI work, all implemented with Visual C++ under Win2K Server. We also helped maintain and extended some of the GUI COM components.

The architecture, which was designed by Chris Brown (one of the original Lotus Notes developers), was designed for Rapid Application Development (RAD) to allow plug-in components to be written in any COM-compliant language. This allowed a high degree of decoupling so that different teams could work independently from one another.