C++
Software Infrastructure
Operating Environment
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Programming and Deployment Platform

We will now review the core technologies used both inside, and in conjunction with XMLbroker--and justify why a technology has been favoured against another.
Table 3.1 presents some candidate programming languages with their associated environments.

Table 3.1: Semi-quantitative comparison of programming languages and their APIs. XML parsing is not considered a discriminating factor because of the wide availability of parsers for all the languages considered.

Language	HTTP	Business	Support for	Language	Productivity
	networking	objects	middleware	experience
C++	Libwww,	through	templates,
	CGI	CORBA	native to OS
Perl	CGI	-	reg. ex.,
	module		shell integr.
Python	diverse	Zope	reflection,
	modules	products	Zope app. serv.
Java	servlet	EJB	J2EE, reflection,
	API		classloader,...

The first two columns, labelled HTTP networking and business objects, correspond to the two levels of `plugability' of XMLbroker into its environment. Whereas these will be discussed in the next section, we only consider here their level of support by the APIs associated with the different languages. The column labelled support for middleware displays the features associated with the languages, that present a particular interest in the context of middleware--mainly by allowing meta-programming (c.f. Section ).
The last column presents a productivity rating associated with the diverse languages. It is adapted from (Prechelt, 2000) and is given irrespectively of any experience with the languages.