Nuts & bolts | Geek
VITES™ Air Traffic Control
This does pretty much what it says on the tin... and a bit more (at least metaphorically – it doesn't actually have anything to do with Jumbo Jets!). ATC handles, via a CGI call, the incoming request, talks to the Rules and Response Engines and feeds the response(s) back (see basic architecture diagram below). One of the responses, at least in current usage, is always a "web" response, i.e. something suitable to serve back to the browser client. (Note: VITES™ was conceived to deliver HTML output, but there is no reason why the response(s) cannot be any form of communication: email, SMS, XML or whatever tickles your fancy. These are not supported at the moment as we have other ways of achieving the same result.)
ATC also handles the loading and saving of the VITES™ Data associated with an individual. Each individual's unique identifier (UID) is passed in with the HTTP request (usually in a cookie). ATC then loads the data associated with the UID and passes it to the Rules Engine (the format of the VITES™ Data will be touched on later) and writes the data back to the database.