Infrae Technologies
Infrae has experience with a broad spectrum of technologies and standards. Our open source business model means we emphasize open standards and initiatives.
Internet technologies and standards
Infrae uses the following web standards and technologies extensively:
HTML, XHTML—the basic markup languages for the web. We concentrate on web applications (as opposed to web design) and have a deep understanding of the issues and requirements involved.
CSS—complete separation of content and presentation is essential for longevity of data, usability, content reuse, and site management.
Apache—the most popular web server in the world, which we often use as a frontend for our software.
LDAP—a protocol for scalable user authentication.
WebDAV—(a.k.a. Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning).
JavaScript for clientside crossbrowser components such as the Kupu WYSIWYG XHTML editor.
Python
Infrae specializes in Python development. Its elegant syntax and powerful features provide the glue that binds all the other technologies we use together.
Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It combines power with readability. It can be easily extended with new functionality.
We make use of the Zope web application platform, which offers a through-the-web management interface, a flexible templating language, relational database integration besides its built-in object database, security infrastructure, XML support, extensibility with new components, scalability through clustering, and many other things. Zope is written in Python.
Python supports many related libraries and technologies, which allows us to use the technologies and standards mentioned in the rest of this list.
XML
We use XML to represent and store textual content in a structured manner. This enables the separation of content from presentation, allowing the use of the same content in different ways. The same data that’s published to the web can be used to generate Word documents and PDFs.
For programmatic access and manipulation of XML, we use both the Document Object Model (DOM), and where performance matters most, the Simple API for XML (SAX).
In order to search large quantities of XML content, we use XPath, a powerful XML query language.
To present content in a variety of ways, as well as to migrate XML data to new formats, we use XSLT to transform XML into other forms of XML (e.g. XHTML).
To provide news streams we use RSS version 1.0 (RSS/RDF).
Databases
Infrae uses the following database technologies:
SQL and relational databases, in particular PostgreSQL, but also others such as MySQL and MS Access. We connect to these with Python.
The Zope Object Database (ZODB), the object store in use by Zope, can also be used by other Python programs. This includes the use of the ZODB as an XML database.
Dynamic generation of print and images
Infrae uses modern techniques to allow transformation of server content into a number of different formats:
We use ReportLab, a Python-based PDF generation library, to generate PDF documents from structured XML documents.
Our Docma Server application generates Word documents from Silva XML, and can do a ‘round trip’, converting and importing Word docs into Silva.
We use various Python libraries for the manipulation and generation of images, such as the Python Imaging Library (PIL).
Operating systems
Infrae’s software is portable across many operating systems.
Infrae is very experienced with Linux, as both server and desktop platform. Some of our customers run our software on other Unices, such as Solaris from Sun.
Our software runs fine on MS Windows too.
Our creative people prefer the incomparable Mac OS X operating system. The Unix guys are perfectly at home on an Apple command line.
Coffee system
Infrae’s espresso machine is mission critical.
Learning
We love to learn new things. Infrae has a pragmatic emphasis on innovation. We use our own software for document production (known as ‘eating your own dog food’) and continually find ways of improving our applications. Feedback from customers and users – especially in the open source world – is essential.