From the Editor - June 1995David M. Kalman
From the Editor - June 1995With this issue of DBMS, I'm announcing DBMS's presence on the Internet's World Wide Web (WWW). There you'll find our home page, which offers a variety of information services related to the magazine and to the database industry at large. To access DBMS on the Web, enter the address http://www.dbmsmag.com in a Web browser program such as NCSA Mosaic or Netscape Navigator.
Our initial Web offering includes selected full-text articles, an industry calendar of events, DBMS editorial calendar listings, late-breaking news, writer's guidelines, and a mechanism for communicating with us simply by pushing a button. DBMS on the Web also includes a comprehensive set of Internet search tools and a database-related resource page that includes links to vendor sites and database-related newsgroups. Because we want this service to be highly interactive, please send us suggestions for additional services you'd like to see. In this first incarnation, our goal was to provide an extension of the magazine that is fast, easy, information-rich, fast, flexible, and fast. As you can tell, I have a pet peeve about Web sites that insist on spewing high-resolution graphics. On our Web site we use small, efficient icons and color-reduced photos and illustrations.
As you can imagine, the Internet has become a popular topic among magazine publishers and editors. Some of my colleagues want to know how it can make us money; others want to know what electronic publishing will mean to the future of print media. My main concern, though, is how to provide you with the best package of information about database and client/server technology (and keep you coming back for more). I believe that DBMS on the Web will help us succeed in that endeavor, while broadening our reach among online inhabitants who may never have seen a printed DBMS.
DBMS on the Web supplements our existing CompuServe forum (GO DBMS), which we will continue to support with great enthusiasm. CompuServe's superior file services make it the logical site for our growing software libraries. Also, we expect continued growth in our forum message traffic. The DBMS forum on CompuServe is still the place to go for lively discussions of database topics and access to a vast resource of information. DBMS on the Web, in contrast, will give us the opportunity to implement Internet-based database applications that include custom forms with e-mail integration, live database queries, and electronic commerce.
If you have questions about DBMS on the Web, write to me at dkalman@mfi.com or to our technical editor, Maurice Frank, at mfrank@mfi.com. Maurice serves as our Internet Webmaster, as well as our CompuServe forum WizOp. He did most of the R&D involved in implementing the Web site, and later this year he will share his experiences in a feature article on Internet/database integration. If you like what you see online, you can thank Maurice; if you don't like it, you can blame me.
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