Biography
Brain-Forge is the trading name of Jonathan Brain the owner of this site.
Jonathan's interests in technology go back to playing with old GPO telephone relays as a child (before BT when the PO brought more to your home than just the post). He then took to programming in Basic easier than a duck takes to water, spent some time programming in assembler (before the days of bloatware - it had to fit in a 1k Eprom and was too slow if it took more than a couple of milliseconds with a 1MHz system clock) and then he discovered C (a lazy mans way of writing assembler).
C opened up the world of Unix which in turn opened up the world of Oracle and then Java all of which Jonathan found he had a natural flair for.
Jonathan's main interests lie in application and database design / development. He experienced the heady days of dumb terminal based applications (remember the VT100?), fat-client PC based applications and now thin-client web based applications (isn't a PC with web browser just a beafed up vt100?). The latter meant learning the skills necessary to write a website such as this one.
Being a family man presented opportunities to get involved with the world of PHP (nice rich language which fits in well with his C / Unix background and also has Object Oriented features), MySql (ideal if you don't want to pay Oracle prices) and websites based upon such technologies.
Web based development has included Oracle Application Express applications together with the use of JQuery.