Babilim Light Industries

Perl

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features include support for multiple programming paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, and functional styles), reference counting memory management (without a cycle-detecting garbage collector), built-in support for text processing, and a large collection of third-party modules.

According to Larry Wall, the original author, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it", and the second is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".

Agent Architectures

From a developer's perspective there are five major trends which are evident from the history of computing. These are; ubiquity, interconnection, intelligence, delegation, and human-orientation. In a similar manner as the shift from procedural to object orientation, agent architectures can be viewed as the next paradigm shift following these trends. However an agent is "just software" not magic. Loosely, an agent is a computational entity which: Acts on behalf of another entity in an autonomous fashion, performs its actions with some level of proactivity and/or responsivenes and exhibits some level of the key attributes of learning, co-operation and mobility.

Web 2.0 and Mashups

Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform".

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.

Open Hardware

Open source hardware refers to computer and electronic hardware that is designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software. Open source hardware is part of the open source culture that takes the open source ideas to fields other than software.

Photo by Nicholas Zambetti

The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

Distributed Sensor Systems

Distributed sensors consist of a spatially distributed network of autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations. The development of wireless sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. However, wireless sensor networks are now used in many civilian application areas, including environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.