Website Design to Internet Applications

In the first year WME established the development environment. The first decision set WME as a 100% OpenSource enterprise. Back in 2001 this was somewhat visionary, yet time has demonstrated the wisdom of that decision.

Our IT environment centers on the programming language Python, an OpenSource, fifth generation, object-oriented language. It allows rapid development of applications with minimal security problems.

Zope was chosen to serve the applications for its stability, maturity, high security and scalability - it allows maintenance of very large applications.

Where we really deviated from the norm was in our decision to approach website design as though it were a program. Most other firms build with a cut-and-paste editor such as FrontPage or GoLive. Instead, we decided to break each application's pages into pieces and reuse those pieces common to each page. This necessitated development of tools to manipulate the content of pages. We have named it CompoundDoc and OpenSourced it under the General Public License.

CompoundDoc allows us to build pieces of pages that can be reused from page to page and application to application. Further, it protects the content of the page so editing can safely be handed to our clients. This has allowed us to build an advanced content management system, CMS, for our clients to manage their applications.

Such an ambitious plan required our lead programmer, Bill, to work on R&D approximately 80% of his time. During the first year he completed the foundation for CompoundDoc, which allowed us to use it while building our applications. Since all our decisions focused on automation, the environment allowed us to build quickly, much more quickly. That allowed us to offer more for less, thus providing a better value.

This overall approach has allowed us to offer much more than just websites built of webpages. Our websites can and have become true Internet applications with many built-in functions besides delivering information content.