• Intranet client/server application for Club IAG
  
• Available hardware and software available features
  
• Website 1.1e + Cold Fusion 2.0 + MS Access 7.0
  
  

• Advertising your site on the World Wide Web
  
• Maintenance: dynamic templates vs static HTML
  
• Make it easier to seek information on your site
  
  

• Vision of the Internet in 2010
  
• Virtual Reality Modeling Language
  
  

An Intranet is the implementation of inexpensive Internet technology providing facilities to do document search, retrieval and display, electronic mail, and group collaboration. It allows to gather and share the information instead of platforms diversity because TCP/IP is a very portable technology.

Intranets can also be connected to existing data base systems to retrieve information easily and graphically. An Intranet is used by a limited number of people and can be connected to the world-wide Internet, if desired.

The Club IAG, student association of the IAG school of management, owns a Pentium 133MhZ on which is already running an Internet Web Server. After analyzing the activities of the association in regard with the background in Internet technologies and the limited budget available, I found it could be tremendous to develop an Intranet for three applications in this order:

1. keep available working documents for people involved in projects in a restricted access directory on the WWW;
2. collect quickly standardized resumes of students for the CV-Book throughout a form even if they are abroad in exchange program;
3. improve stock control of the Course Notes Shop thanks to an ordering form coupled with real time informations about available syllabi and stocks level.

Available hardware and software features

The idea is to build an Intranet based on available material. The easiest and fastest way is to take advantage of TCP/IP overlay and HTTPd Server that are already running.

The first step of the Intranet project was to be easily realized by manipulating the server administrator options, but the second and tird steps require to set up a link between the server and two databases (students and syllabi). This link has to respect the following architecture :

Note : I installed War-FTPD because it is the most complete FTP freeware server and website because it supports Visual Basic 4.0 CGIs and is free for academic use. In addition these softwares are 32bits, powerful, scalable on the system and highly configurable.

Website 1.1e + Cold Fusion 2.0 + MS Access 7.0

At first look, it seems that the best solution might be programming CGIs in Visual Basic. VB is an easy object oriented language fully compatible with MS Access 7.0 and Win95 (all are released by Microsoft). In addition, WebSite supports VB CGIs thanks to its CGI32.BAS.

Actually, VB 4.0 was designed before Internet booming and is not really Internet oriented. So, coding effort is important and you need to recompile every time you make a modification of HTML code included in CGI or an enhancement of the capabilities of the script.

Big Internet/Intranet systems use Informix or Oracle to manage databases with SQL language, but theses systems are too expensive. Seeking for similar product, I found the new released Cold Fusion 2.0. Its requirements are adapted to the existing architecture.
With Cold Fusion, we can create a wide variety of HTML dynamic pages called CFML pages in reference to CF. Pages are text merging HTML and CF tags. The new workflow explain you how to come into the system in order to enhance it.

Cold Fusion encapsulates SQL queries in HTML pages like Informix but for only $500.
On one side, CFML pages need little programming knowledge, are easy to develop and very portable. If you change from relational database, server... to another, it always works! But on the other side, it is slow (compiled every time), server side oriented and there is no user friendly interface to write CFML codes.

Nobody arrives on your WWW site by chance. Basically, there are six ways for people to arrive on your web pages:

1. search engines - For those people who know how to write search equations and to look for accurate informations, search engines like Alta Vista, HotBot or Lycos are the best way to find it. You can register to each search engine by yourself, but also use submit it, SAM and other similar sites doing it for you automatically;

2. directories - These sites like Yahoo or Magellan, list relevant WWW sites by topics. These sites are mostly used by people who do not have a precise idea of what they are looking for, newcomers and people wanting a selection of sites with description. Usually, when you register to directories, you have no insurance to be listed;

3. mailing lists and newsgroups - You can advertise your site by posting informations on it in different mailing lists and newsgroups. Be sure to follow the rules before posting and and try to focus your action on potentially interested group of people. This way is expensive in terms of time because older messages are deleted, so you have to repost it frequently;

4. confidentially - No matter what you do, but, you can be sure that if your site is amazing, people will talk about it... like the Victor Horta's Museum;

5. hyperlinks - The exchange of links between sites talking about the same topic is a common behaviour on the WWW. You can also exchange advertising banners with other sites thanks to Netvertising or to pay for inserting you banner on frequented sites like search engines;

6. newspapers and magazines - Some magazines write sites critics (for example, this site was site of the week in Trends-Tendances, a Belgian business economy magazine). Maybe you can write emails to these magazines and ask them for they talk about your site. Of course, you can also buy advertising space;

To make big plans about the Internet, it could be interesting to have a vision of what it could become in the year 2010.

In 2010, 50% of North Americans use Internet daily, a trans-Atlantic phone call costs 4 cents per minute and 28% of all international voice communication takes place over the Internet. For 5 years, phone services tarification has been no more based on distance. Telecoms operators have adopted a flat fee tarification like Internet Services Providers. Mergings on large scope have taken place between these two industries. The flat fee allowed a cutting down of about 30% in costs.

Graduetely, faxes are replaced by electronic mail and scanner because of its cheaper cost and the more flexible use, it provides. A comparison of costs and time efficiency allows to understand why:

In 2010, the Internet reachs houses and companies with wide bandwith capacities and by many ways:

• by copper twisted-pair with HDSL or optic fibers(60%);
• by coaxial TV cable (25%);
• by broadcasting and wireless technologies(15%)

After network standardization in the years 2000, arrived presentation and content standardization avoiding the collapse of the World Wide Web. The amount of informations on the Internet was so huge that it became impossible for crawlers to index them. The solution found was to create a synergy between browser and AIsites (WWW sites became so complex that they were called Application with Interface sites) to allow everybody to navigate easily by customized GUI and intelligent agents scrutinyzing cyberspace following your preferences.

Virtual Reality Modeling Language

The new specifications of VRML 2.0 from Silicon Graphics and new processors like Pentium Pro and MMX could be a milestone in the spreading of VRML on the World Wide Web. VRML suffered to be to static. New features include Java, Active X, Shockwave, ... like HTML pages but in 3D (example: Lighthouse).

Now, VRML needs a good browser transparent software supporting VRML 2.0. Maybe like Liquid Reality and a critical mass of VRML sites. This could happend quicker than expected because sites developers always try to make their site more attractive.

In addition, 3D surfing is maybe one of the issues to facilitate navigation through cyberspace. Why not rebuild in VRML locations people are familiar with.
We can figure out virtual reality shops for www.*.com sites. When a customer enter a VRshop, navigation to buy goods becomes more intuitive because the store is no longer a 2D presentation with text, links and icons, but a 3D environment with vendors, a cashier and displays of goods. And it looks like their real store where you entered a couple of time. Your attention is no longer focused on How to make your surfing right but on for what good am I going to spend money here.

Microsoft has just started to sale car on the web with an other technology to describe 3D space. The www.carpoint.com site uses a video surround plug-in (360� view of the inside of the car).

To get the latest news on VRML, go on GB's VRML news page.