Nuts & bolts | Geek
Introduction
If you're sure you want to know how the system really works read on!
VITES™ comprises three core components: Air Traffic Control, the Rules Engine and the Response Engine. These are written in Perl and designed to run under a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl) environment, though, with a bit of tweaking, there's no reason you could not get it to work in other environments; even Windows/IIS/SQL Server/ActivePerl if you were feeling suicidal (we jest; each to his or her own!).
Why Perl?
This is a question that we often get asked, though normally by non-technical people and usually suffixed with "why not PHP/ASP?". Since the bulk of the system is not actually web-facing, that pretty much rules out PHP and ASP; it is not the task they were designed to perform. "Why not C?" would be a harder position to defend but the answer, as with most projects, is pretty simple: we can write Perl and it does the job! Of course, we have the huge additional benefit of an enormous and well-tested open-source code base in the CPAN depository. There is little point in re-inventing the wheel and certainly none if your wheel would end up square It has to be said that we have done a little bit of wheel-reinvention in VITES™ v2.x, some of which has worked well and some of which, er, hasn't! (Wouldn't life be dull – and less educational - if we never tried to re-invent the wheel?)
So on to the components: