Research and development
Abilian is actively involved in research and experimental development in computer science.
An R&D lab to design tomorrow's products and technologies
Our experts are building tomorrow's projects with a range of solutions based on web technologies, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Abilian is supported by its internal projects, its presence in competitive clusters (Systematic, Cap Digital...) as well as collaborations with major French and European universities (Inria, Télécom Paristech, Institut Mines-Telecom, EPITA research laboratory, ENS, etc.), and of course with the open source ecosystems.
The lab's mission: to bring out and implement projects that are most in line with our vision of innovation, our development strategy, and our technological and commercial objectives.
Innovation policy
Our policy is based on 3 founding principles:
Guiding our offer by the future needs of our customers, which also pushes us to explore new horizons, and thus different markets.
Innovate by putting R&D at the centre of various industrial and academic collaborations, symbolising Abilian's constant quest for new challenges.
To be involved in many research projects which have been Abilian's strength for 10 years.
Our core competencies
Abilian has developed core competencies in the following areas to ensure the success of its R&D projects:
In-depth industry knowledge: we strive to understand the trends, needs and challenges of the software industry, and our clients' sectors, to develop relevant solutions.
Technical expertise: To develop quality open source software, it is essential to have strong technical expertise in areas such as programming, software architecture, databases, etc.
Innovative spirit: we need to be innovative to stand out in a competitive market. We encourage our employees to experiment and take risks to develop new solutions and improve existing products.
Project management skills: To ensure the delivery of quality products on time, we have developed project management skills, such as planning, estimating, risk management, etc. This is true both for our products and for our services. This is true for our internal projects, for the projects we carry out with our clients, and for multi-partner collaborative projects.
Communication and collaboration: we work closely with our community and with our clients to understand their needs and improve our products. Communication and collaboration skills are therefore essential, as well as a thorough knowledge of open source development practices.
Continuous learning ability: Technology is changing rapidly and it is important to follow trends and continue to learn in order to stay current and develop innovative solutions.
Collaborative projects
Cython+ (2020-2022)
The "Cython+" project aims at transferring the extremely powerful multi-core concurrent programming model of the Go language to the Python language by relying on scientific and technological approaches stemming from three decades of French know-how in the field of concurrent object programming around Actalk.
Wendelin (2014-2019)
Wendelin was a big data engine project funded in part by the Programme d'Investissements d'Avenir. Wendelin was built around internationally recognised open source software. Two industrial applications were developed within the framework of the project: the preventive maintenance of wind turbines and the preventive maintenance of automobiles. In both cases, Big Data makes it possible to predict a breakdown before it occurs and thus improve the quality of service provided to users.
Abilian's contribution to this is the open source project Olapy, an OLAP analysis engine.
The Wendelin project started in 2014 and was completed in 2019.
Open source projects
We develop and maintain several open source projects, some of which are used by thousands of developers around the world.
You can find a list of them on our Github account.
Our dedicated site, https://lab.abilian.com, presents them in a more comprehensive way, as well as a knowledge base that allows our R&D team to store and organise the knowledge and information collected during our projects, and share it with the rest of our staff (pre-sales, support, etc.), as well as with our customers.
Here is the list of our most impactful open source projects:
Nua
Nua is an open source cloud platform project launched by Abilian in 2021. It offers a PaaS (platform as a service) that can be easily installed on bare metal or virtualised servers, and allows to run containerised web applications, managing their lifecycle, the resources they need (storage, databases, etc.), user access rights, backups, monitoring, logs...
Abilian SBE
Abilian SBE is a modular, open source, cloud-ready software platform for business applications based on emerging collaboration. In other words, it is a development and execution framework and a collection of business applications and services.
Abilian SBE serves as the foundation for most of the company's application projects.
Abilian Core
Abilian Core is the web application framework that serves as the foundation for Abilian SBE. It is a set of tools and software libraries that simplify and accelerate the development of collaborative and business web applications.
Other open source projects
Abilian DevTools
Abilian DevTool is a collection of libraries and tools dedicated to Python development, carefully selected and combined to create an efficient, high-performance and easy-to-maintain development environment.
One of the main features of Abilian DevTool is that it is "opinionated". This means that the tools included in the collection have been chosen based on the experience and expertise of our developers, and are considered the best tools for Python development. By using this collection, developers can be confident that they are using tools that have been tested and proven in real development environments.
Flask-Vite
Flask-Vite is a plugin for Flask that allows developers to use ViteJS with their existing Flask application in a simple and easy way. It makes it easy to manage front-end assets and supports useful features such as live reloading and HMR mode. Flask-Vite can be a great choice for Flask developers looking to improve the productivity of their front-end development by using modern and efficient tools.