A behind-the-scenes look at powerful, database-driven web sites.
I am a procrastinator by nature. When deadlines loom, I find myself taking a five-minute break on the Web. I look up recipes on http://www.epicurious.com, check out plane fares to Paris on http://www.travelocity.com, or calculate how much I'll need to save in order to retire in five years on http://www.fremontbank.com/invest.cgi. The Web offers limitless possibilities, and it isn't just a great place to waste time. It offers increasing amounts of information (much of it derived from databases) to help people get their jobs done more efficiently. More than pretty screens that let you do things, these sites are complicated composites of technology. The purpose of this column is to show what makes database-driven Web sites tick. I hope it will give you ideas for your company's own projects or present solutions to problems with which you are grappling. This will be an ongoing column. It will continue as Internet Systems becomes a bimonthly DBMS supplement starting in January, 1996.
Every day I use Personal Web Box from Business Wire (New York). Specifically for international media relations professionals, Personal Web Box lets you create a profile of yourself based on a set of interest categories. Once the profile is established and your subscription has been registered, you receive a confirmation email that includes the URL to your own personal Web box ... hence the name. The box gives you just the news you want, updated however many times a day you want (you actually only have three options), and in whatever format you want.
Currently maintained by a six-person staff, the product was developed by a team of two professionals: one from Business Wire and one from Harrison & Troxell, the Internet services developer for Business Wire. The site runs on Recital from Recital Corp. Inc. (Danvers, Mass., http://www.recital.com). Developers faced a number of challenges when system development began in May 1995. Only a few tools were available, period, much less for Recital, so the team had to create all the templates and code by hand. Scripts are written in Perl and C shell. All development was done on Sun (Unix Sun OS) workstations using X Windows. The company's latest upgrade in March 1996 included porting to Sparc 20 MPs using Solaris, which is better able to handle the high volume of requests the site is receiving. Recital's database engine is being used to generate the pages and CGI scripts for formatting output. After creating an email component called E-Mail Select, development of Personal Web Box took only about one month. Revision 2, which lets users go back to the last 30 days of news and includes other newswires, also took one month.
To access information, users click on industry keywords and categories. Figure 1 shows the initial screen in my own Personal Web Box, with the industry categories I selected for my profile. Clicking on a category brings up HTML pages of headlines that are generated via CGI scripts. To serve up the HTML, the site uses three templates for registration and two for displaying output. Using Netscape Loganalyser and customized tracking software, Business Wire has determined that it receives 2.4 million hits per month, with a hits-to-impressions ratio of approximately 10 to one. The site has been redesigned every six months, with the next upgrade slated for the end of 1996 or beginning of 1997. With the new version, the company will shift over to Oracle7 on the back end and the Oracle Web Server on the front end. Webmaster Peter Karlson explained that, along with the shift to Oracle, he wants the site to be able to handle up to a million hits per day. To this end, he plans to shift from using pregenerated pages to pages that are generated on the fly. Contact Business Wire, 800-221-2462, 212-752-9600, or fax 212-752-9698; http://www.businesswire.com.
Trade Compass was founded in December, 1994, by 15-year trading veteran Browning Rockwell. Seven full-time programmers worked on the site, as well as several task-specific outside consultants. HTML coding and graphics design for the site began in January 1995, and since then the company has gradually added new applications, shipping schedules, and company databases to its offerings. Engineers completed what they consider the more hard-core database programming and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) work in the first half of 1996. The site accesses Oracle, FoxPro, and Mumps Data Manager databases. The linking between the Web server and database servers is made with hand-written CGI scripts in Perl and C. The site uses hand-coded forms, rather than templates, to serve up the HTML.
By the time you read this, Trade Compass will have released a new component of its site that uses Oracle Express Server (Oracle's multidimensional OLAP server), Oracle Web Server, and Oracle Express Objects. The new service will let Trade Compass users analyze huge amounts of United Nations international trade information by country, entry port, and commodity. Until now, this information was only available in CD-ROM format. Users currently create reports with Trade Compass' own proprietary software; the Oracle component will broaden the reporting capabilities to include graphing. Trade Compass also plans to offer an Oracle-based Intranet solution to let clients integrate proprietary information from external databases with information from within their own firewalls.
Business Development Manager Wayne McFadden estimates that the site has received between 80,000 and 120,000 hits per month. Usage is analyzed with Intersé Market Focus 2 from Intersé Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif., http://www.interse.com), which generates reports based on logins. Because it is a business-to-business site, Trade Compass' usage tends to be heavier during regular business hours. McFadden attributes a significant slow-down in July to the simple fact that many people were on summer vacation. Contact Trade Compass, 202-783-4455 or fax 202-783-4465; http://www.tradecompass.com.
The Stock Smart site accepts over 20 data feeds. After the feed is received, it is processed and summarized using Oracle 7.2. All data is edited and verified with a specially designed system, written for Stock Smart's internal departments, that accesses the Oracle database using PowerBuilder applications. Once the data has been accepted, a series of processes generates a report database with summaries and partially denormalized tables, the data repository. Over 90 percent of the site involves dynamic pages generated on the fly, with a 15-minute frequency on the remaining 10 percent that require larger processes to summarize and rank various features within the site. Stock quotes and news are tied to real-time feeds, which are sometimes delayed in order to conform with Exchange requirements. The site contains approximately 60 templates that dynamically generate over 30,000 different Web pages. Currently in development are versions of the portfolio manager that will use Java and/or Frames. Contact Stock Smart Inc., 214-720-0060 or fax 214-720-0120; http://www.stocksmart.com.
FIGURE 1
--The initial screen in my own Personal Web Box, with the industry categories I selected in my user profile.
FIGURE 2
--The first page a visitor sees when accessing Trade Compass is this screen, which is designed to resemble an information kiosk.
FIGURE 3
--A basic example of a personal portfolio that you can set up for yourself in Stock Smart.
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