Development Languages and Environment

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The primary development languages are Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Perl (a scripting language similar to C-shell), and C/C++. Each provides a specific level of functionality:

HTML version 2.0
HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language) is prehaps the most volatile resource that is involved. A key feature of the World Wide Web, the details of HTML's functionality, and the clients which interpret it, determine the look, feel and limitations of Web resources. While HTML v2.0 is the current standard, having replaced v1.0 only months ago, and is largely responsible for the popularity of the Web (thanks to in-line images, audio and certain formatting features), its limits have been the source of constant frustration for many developers. This is so much so that Netscape Communications, makers of the most popular browser Netscape Navigator, almost immediately introduced ``extensions" to HTML which have subsequently caused many problems; many Web designers use the extensions (such as tables, background colours, and server/client push/pull) resulting in pages that can only be properly viewed by Netscape. An instantiation of SGML (Standard General Markup Language), HTML is composed of plain text ``marked up" with special instruction elements which suggest how the text should be organized including text formatting, in-line images, page elements such as lines, and hypertextual links between different pages potentially on different servers across the Internet. When HTML-encoded information is delivered upon request, the client is free to interpret the elements howsoever it has been configured to. This makes quality control very difficult as there is little guarantee that the person viewing the information is seeing it as it was intended.
The latest version of HTML has now been released, v3.0, and it includes provision for a new programming element, Java. We comment on the anticipated role of Java in a later section. We have not made any use of either HTML v3.0 or Java.
Perl version 4.0
Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text input, extracting information from the stream, and printing reports based on that information. It's a good language for many information management tasks. The language is designed to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than aesthetic (tiny, elegant, ). It combines many of the best features of the standard UNiX working environment like C, sed, awk, csh and sh. Similar to sh and csh, it is used as a scripting language much as that used for C-shell but it can be used in a structured fashion like C.
This is the default language for responsive command ``cgi-bin" scripts which can be attached to HTML pages. It allows for user tailored requests for information and is the basis for the various interfaces found in the Organics project (i.e. document submission). Unfortunately, most of the existing Perl-based technology is relatively immature and these interfaces have to be written entirely from scratch. In time libraries of useful routines are expected to appear. Perl code development consumes most of the developer time, closely followed by manual generation of HTML code.
C/C++
Since interpreted scripts can be often somewhat inefficient or insecure, C or C++ is used for all exectuables. In particular, these are most helpful for compute-intensive or memory-intensive operations and also for programs composed of highly complex operations or those needing a high level of security. Only a small percentage of the development was devoted to C/C++ coding.

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