MLMWebPro was written in C, C++, HTML, and JavaScript using Btrieve (Pervasive SQL), MySQL, and /or DISAM databases. The text below explains why MIS has chosen these particular tools to incorporate into their system.

Why 'C' and 'C++' languages? The choices are 'C/C++', MS Access, VisualBasic, COBOL, Java, and a few others. MIS chose 'C/C++' langauages because it is the most efficient, lowest level language in which software can be written. Computers only understand 1's and 0's, which is known as machine language. The next higher language is Assembler, but it is a very time consuming and tedious language. The next higher language is 'C/C++', and 85% of all commercial programs in the world are written in 'C/C++', including Windows, most UNIX/Linux operating systems, most other programming languages or compilers, most databases, etc. MS Access, VisualBasic, Java, and COBOL programs are a high level and must be interpreted to the machine machine during execution which accounts for its high overhead and very slow operation. COBOL is a language like Pascal is old and is rarely used by anyone extra people that do not want to learn better languages. An interesting example of the difference in COBOL programming language and C++ is when you print something to the screen using C++, it takes a single sentence; if you use COBOL, it will take as many as 10 or more lines of code. When you are requesting customization, which would you rather pay for -- C++ or COBOL?

The software runs on a Windows 2000 and Windows XP platform. We use IBM Netfinity servers and at two locations. The primary location has the primary servers and secondary servers. The second location has backup servers in case something happens to all of the servers at our primary location. The data is replicated from our primary site to the secondary site at all times so that our secondary site could take over in an emergency. Using this method allows us to never be down for very long.

The web servers are Apache. We chose the Apache web server because of its performance and reliability compared to other popular web servers which seem to have a lot of problems that are found periodically by hackers. Apache web server is used by over 65% of the web hosting companies in the US.

The databases are DISAM, Pervasive SQL, and MySQL. We chose a combination of these databases because of performance, flexibility, and reliability. DISAM and Pervasive SQL have been tested in years past to out run other very popular databases by as much as 8 times the speed. MySQL is another very fast and reliable database. MySQL is currently used by a lot of the major search engines.