FOTEP Software Development What Technologies Does FOTEP Use?   The most critical needs of any well-designed solution are quality, stability and portability. FOTEP prefers to avoid new technologies that do not meet these needs any better than platforms and systems which have proven themselves with the test of time. FOTEP tends to use the following: C/C++ Class/Data Encapsulation Design -- There are plenty of computer programming languages and approaches out there. If you are going to do the job right, you need to stick to standards and the use of quality components. C and C++ runs on Windows and in Unix environments. C# is only starting to get there. Regardless of the language, proper program structure and data design is critical and it is for this reason that data encapsulation and program classes within C++ have been chosen by FOTEP as the preferred compiled language implementation. Besides, interpreted pseudo-code languages are so 1980. PERL Efficient Scripting and Data Manipulation -- PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is, first and foremost, a data manipulation language. Add to this an excellent shell scripting capability and you have the makings of a rapid development system that is lightweight and robust. Newer systems and languages exist, but none have withstood the rigors of testing and use like PERL. FOTEP's choice for online and offline data manipulation with the logic capabilities to make it all versatile, is PERL. Embedded Dynamic Content via CGI -- There are all sorts of experts touting this implementation or another, but the all-around best is an approach that doesn't confuse code with content and places the handling of the tricky parts where you know you have the most compatibility. By leaving data, logic and page manipulation on your server, FOTEP takes the pain out of web browser incompatibility and developer headaches. How many times has Microsoft changed their "standard" for client/server communications? Also ask yourself if you want your web designer to do web design and your programmer to do programming instead of having some weird blending of functions in the same PHP source file. None of these are issues with a well-designed CGI (PERL or C/C++) design sitting on your server. Tried, True and Trusted Technology Platforms -- Your application or website needs to work. Now and in the future. There's not much we can do about changes to Windows, but there is plenty we can do about making sure that your web server (even if it is sitting on a Windows machine) keeps working. For this reason, FOTEP has made it's language, architecture and service design choices. Wouldn't life be a lot easier if you could move your site from Windows Apache to Linux Apache instead of having to rework all of your IIS-specific logic? And applications can and should work with Internet content and web services. Shouldn't this be transparent and simple?