Communication Practice

Internet Communications

We support all leading protocols for establishing communication links via the Internet, including:

• HTTP
• FTP
• UDP broadcasts
• Windows Terminal Server remote sessions
• PC Anywhere remote control sessions

We have written Internet communications components that can be embedded in any applications that need to find each other and connect over any IP link, and then stream any code or data back and forth. This simple architecture supports many distributed processing tasks, including distributed queries, report writing sessions, and many others.

Of course, we have created many Internet applications that go beyond the fundamental communications layer described here. See our Internet Practice.

Device Interfacing

Input/output devices are the eyes and ears and hands of software. As more and more devices become "smart," it opens more avenues for automating processes that formerly required manual intervention. These advances in the devices themselves, together with the advent of the Internet, allows our software to extend its long arm to countless local and remote devices that generate weights, report events and errors, capture video, capture bar codes, record inventory status, place orders, and a host of others.
We have long taken advantage of these device control possibilities. For example, we have written programs that:

• Receive crime notices via FM broadcasts.
• Receive bid, ask, and trade transactions from all major exchanges, filtering the transactions of interest, and folding this data into our real-time trade optimization programs.
• Capture weigh-ins and weigh-outs from truck scales, automatically calculating the shipped weight and times, printing tickets and reports, and controlling the stoplights that tell drivers when to exit the scale.
• Generate bar codes on package labels, ready for pickup and scanning by UPS.
• Capture data from remote elevators by interfacing with popular Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's), and incorporating this data into visual representations on our central monitoring station.
• Convert Computer-Aided Design (CAD) files to the machine control language, so they could control a state-of-the-art industrial metal-working machine tool.

These examples do not include the countless more common computing input/output devices that we interface with: touch-screen monitors, mice, printers, and monitors. (Of course, many of these tasks were more difficult with older operating systems that did not define standard device drivers in the way that Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and other modern operating systems do. Ask us about our cool utility for debugging the Escape sequences in HP Laserjet print streams!)

Dial-up Communications

We also have experience with the now-legacy method of communicating: communicating via telephone, via interactive or scripted terminal programs, bulletin board systems, remote control programs, and the like.