by I'd like to announce to this group that the second Piclan-IP server is
now up and running on the 'net. You can reach it at
www.webmate.absc.com.
This server is a demostration site for web applications tied to our
college bookstore retail and textbook management systems (Comtext and
Sellmate). These are prototype applications and the user interface you
see at this site may change somewhat in the shrink-wrapped release. But
the core functionality is all there. Our target market here is the
college bookstore industry, so most of what you see is slanted in that
direction. We will add other applications as our customer base requests
them. We are rolling this out at our industry trade show starting this
weekend. Currently, none of our competition has anything like this.
The absolute killer theme of these apps is that they are using the
database from the store systems applications in a real-time manner - as
updates happen on the Pick side of the server, the data is available to
the Web apps. And, web administration is zip - just like most Pick
systems!
There are 4 main options. The first is a title lookup app. It uses 6
different databases, each with their own indexes to find what you're
looking for. The lookup engine could very well be tuned up in the
production release, but in most cases the response times are quite
acceptable. In this case, you are scanning over 500,000 titles.
The second app is a course lookup app. It is a drill-down model,
starting at the top with the term you wish to browse, then to the
department list, then to the course list and finally to the section and
title listings. The pages are realtime with the store system database,
so as the database is updated, the updates are reflected in the pages.
The pages are created on the fly - they are not static.
The third app is a variation on the second. Here you fill in a gird
with dept codes, course numbers and section numbers fo the classes you
are taking in the term (see above to browse the course database). The
result is listing off the titles for all the classes you are taking.
Again, this is dynamic data - not static files. This app will be
extended to allow you to just enter your student ID and the app will use
the database to create the title list.
The last app is a very simple online catalog. The cool thing here is
that the images are stored on the Pick host - not on some other DOS
system. Using the Piclan copy routines, you copy the image files to
Pick files and store them there in hex. The Piclan-IP web server does
the hex to binary conversion on the fly.
The system is a very hum-drum Pentium 133 w 32mb RAM and 1GB IDE disk
with an ISA NIC. The system cost less than $900, and is by no means a
well-tuned system. It is running GA PRO 4.0 with Piclan 2.0.0.7 and
Piclan-IP build 101. It is located at our ISP site.
I'd very much like all who read this to visit the site and work the
apps. If you'd like more info on how we built it and how things work on
the Pick, please post your questions here so everyone can read them.
Thanks for your time... Please do Visit!
--
Regards,
Count Darling IV