Server software

We chose to implement the server on Linux for a number of reasons:

• It's a lot easier to write Unix software than Windows software. This is particularly true of network communications code and server processes.
• In our experience, Linux is a very fast, very reliable operating system. It's also very well supported by the Internet community.
• The price is right!
• We were already very familiar with Linux.

Once the operating system and database protocol design were fixed, all we needed was a physical database access system. Rather than write our own, we used CodeBase, which allows programs written in C to manipulate xBase-compatible database files. We used CodeBase because we were familiar with it from previous projects and have found it to be fast and reliable.