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Today, most programmers write in C++ or C. C++ is an object-oriented programming language;
object-oriented languages provide the programmer with a facility to create a programming object or
module that may be reused in many applications. The widespread use of the Internet spawned a new
category of languages. Perl, Java, and PHP (which originally stood for Personal Home Page and is
generally now considered to mean hypertext preprocessor, with the first “P” being recursive) are
generally referred to as scripting languages and allow the application to behave according to the user‟s
needs.
Tools were developed to be used by the end users themselves, thus freeing up IT professionals from
simple tasks. These are called fourth-generation programming languages. There are a variety of types
of 4GLs currently in use:
• Report-generation tools. These take a description of the data and the report to be generated
and generate the report. They are usually data source dependent. Crystal Reports is an example of
such a tool.
• Statistical tools. These 4GLs, such as SAS and SPSS, provide commands for data
manipulation, selection, and reporting.
• Data reporting tools. These tools are usually provided with relational databases. They
range from template input (as was illustrated in Chapter 19) to Structured Query Language
(SQL). These tools retrieve data and can do some minor formatting.
Middleware
Middleware began to appear in the 1980s as a way to link newer applications to older legacy systems.
The easiest way to think of middleware is as a translator. It takes the data from one application and
converts it to a format and structure that a second application can use. They might be different types of
application software, different operating systems, or different database structures.
The software has evolved into the technology that provides interoperability between distributed
architectures and distributed applications. Middleware services provide application programming
interfaces (APIs) to supply the interaction. Some types of middleware are remote procedure calls
(RPCs) that do exactly that, message-oriented middleware (MOM) that sends messages but doesn‟t
expect a response immediately (as is the case with RPCs), object request brokers that are used for
object-oriented systems, and SQL-oriented data access middleware between applications and database
servers.
Software as a Service
A new model of software deployment called software as a service (SaaS) has recently emerged.
Software services from SaaS providers have been developed to leverage Web technologies and have
been built with a multitenant back end that allows multiple users to access a shared data model.
Customer access to the application is via the Internet. All processing happens on the vendor‟s
hardware; all data is stored on the vendor‟s hardware. The SaaS provider takes care of software
maintenance, ongoing operations of the hardware and network, and support for the application.