Technologies

Netrogen have developed considerable expertise in a number of procedural and object-oriented imperative programming languages, database languages, markup languages and markup meta-languages.

Programming Languages

In addition to some experience of Java, VBScript, C++, and scheme, Netrogen have core competences in C, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript.

C

Comparatively little work is undertaken in C, but projects have been undertaken on Linux and Solaris with cognisance of ANSI/ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (ANSI C99) and POSIX/SUS.

Perl

Most of our heavy-lifting is done in Perl for websites, including content-management systems, and business automation.

PHP

We find PHP to be an easier language to use for “light-lifting” and simple server-side tasks for websites.

JavaScript

Writing portable JavaScript for client-side forms and features is a challenging task that few web developers appear to get right.

Through experience and careful testing, the JavaScript used for the sliding menus on this site have been made to work on a wide variety of browsers.

Database Languages

SQL

We generally use MySQL for websites, but have used Microsoft SQL Server extensively to meet other customer requirements and PostgreSQL in development, evaluation and test.

Markup

XML

XML is, almost certainly, the buzzword of the moment.

We have amassed considerable experience of the XSLT and XHTML 1.0 applications of XML. In addition, we use XSL-FO with FOP to produce our own invoices, purchase orders, and other business documents.

For current projects, we are conducting a detailed review, with particular emphasis on financial services, of a large number of XML, and XML-related, standards and would-be standards including ebXML, the WS-I Basic Profile, cXML, FpML, FIXML, IFX, OFX, xCBL, XBRL and BPML. In the process, we have naturally become familiar with WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP.

XHTML

The current W3C Recommendation for HTML is XHTML 1.0 Second Edition. This is a re-phrasing of HTML 4.01 in terms of XML rather than SGML. This site, in common with most of our recent work, uses XHTML 1.0 where possible.

DHTML

DHTML is a marketing term which appeared around the same time as version 4.x of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator (as it was then called). There is no DHTML standard or formal specification.

These browsers departed from the behaviour of earlier versions by allowing elements of the HTML page content to be generated and controlled by the scripting facilities of the browser, usually JavaScript. The sliding menus on this site are an example.