Web Sites

waldura.com

2000 - This site (yes, this one) is entirely configured from a relational database. Every aspect of the site is stored in the database, offering an unmatched flexibility of configuration, maintenance and development. And with almost infinite scalability! Currently managed from the database:

mail accounts
Apache configuration (virtual hosts)
Web logs
DNS (hostnames)
and more...

I am in the process of documenting this sophisticated setup. Let me know if you are interested in getting an advance look at these documents.

em:t.cc

2000 - www.em:t.cc is a personal project to honor the memory of a great label of ambient music, now defunct. This small site, designed according to the simple Model 1 architecture, involves Java Beans, JSPs and servlets. Cool features include the ability to create a playlist (a selection of songs) that can be listened to online (MP3 streaming).

The site features unique content and has become a work of reference in its niche. It is now the sum of the work of a lot more people than just myself! I was only responsible for the initial effort and the core implementation. Most of the content was submitted by users.

Part of that initial effort was the necessary gathering and formatting of data. Using a couple of ad-hoc Perl programs, I gathered and extracted data from Web pages, then formatted and loaded it into a SQL database to create all the albums and songs information. This done, I wrote a set of Java Beans to retrieve data from the database, and Java Server Pages to format and display those beans. The playlist and streaming features (the songs can be listened to online) required a little more work, with two custom Java servlets. See the technical details page of that site for more information and source code.

Telecom Valley (France Telecom)

1995 - I built Telecom Valley's very first Web site from scratch, hardware and software. The site content was gathered, structured and put online using a custom template-based methodology that allowed me to complete the project in a short timeframe.

Telecom Valley is a non-profit organization whose goal is to promote and develop the Sophia Antipolis area of Southern France. Its members include most of the high-tech companies located there, e.g. France Telecom, Digital (now Compaq), Alcatel, Texas Instruments, IBM, etc. Visit Telecom Valley's Web site for the whole list.

After analyzing the project's requirements, I specified and recommended the purchase of the system used as Web server (IBM workstation running AIX). After setting it up, I designed a methodology to install and update members' pages on the server; I configured remote dial-up access with PPP, and created a template used to gather structured content. This template was processed by custom Perl programs to generate the actual HTML documents. The site was successfully completed and ready for demo'ing at Telecom Valley's first public exposure in September 1995.

This was at the time ground-breaking work for a very forward-thinking organization. Working independently under very little supervision, I had to show ingenuity when confronted to new problems specific to the Web medium, and craft my own solutions. Although I quickly identified the need for a domain-specific markup language, no tools were available at the time to process it correctly. Today I would probably create my own DTD and simply convert XML files into HTML with a custom XSLT stylesheet.

This assignment gave me my first exposure to Web site development and allowed me to learn the Perl language. The original report is available in French only.