21 August 2006, by Karl Bunyan
We've done a few data driven CD-ROMs over the past few years, and each one has had slightly different requirements and therefore a slightly different solution. All three were using Macromedia Director as the presentation engine, with programming in Lingo to pull out data and present it. 
We’ve done a few data driven CD-ROMs over the past few years, and each one has had slightly different requirements and therefore a slightly different solution. All three were using Macromedia Director as the presentation engine, with programming in Lingo to pull out data and present it. The projects, in order, were:
- Repute - Risk analysis tool
- Muraspec - Product selector
- RICS - Prospectus search
An outline of the approach for each follows.
Repute - Risk analysis tool
The Repute CD-ROM didn’t require a lot of data to be displayed so a set of custom objects were created to hold information about case studies including relevant issues tagged as keywords. This flexible structure allowed links between content on the CD to be generated automatically so the user was always presented with a ‘next step’ relevant case study.
The small amount of data, and the flexible way it was structured, meant it was a better option to use bespoke code in this case rather than integrate with a third party application.
Muraspec - Product selector
Muraspec had a product database (in Microsoft SQL Server) with over 2000 products in it. This was going to be used as the basis for data on the CD-ROM and so it made sense to investigate how a tool could be used to translate data from the database to a CD-based format on an automated regular basis. For this we chose to use the V12 system by Integration New Media. This still required a substantial amount of code to be written to perform the searches and display information on the screen but the basic data engine was already there.
RICS - Prospectus search
Having built a course search system for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 2003 we were well placed to develop a similar system on a CD. Again, there was an existing database, and again it was on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, but in this case the searches were much simpler and the time taken to integrate with something such as V12, given the amount of code that would have to be written in any case, made it a better decision to write bespoke search code and a custom object structure.
Data updates were likely to be performed annually so there needed to be some way of refreshing it so we wrote some code in ASP.Net to produce the Lingo code we needed to generate the object structure in Director. It’s not a conventional approach but it works well for this project.
Summary
Integrating with third-party applications (known as Xtras) gives a lot of added functionality in Director, but generally there is still a lot of Lingo code to be written if there’s anything complex to be done. Some of the main considerations are:
- Cost of licensing a third-party tool
- The size of the data
- The complexity of the searches
- The format the original data is in
August 21, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Filed in: Front-end, Programming
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18 August 2006, by Karl Bunyan
If you have a website, you may be able to put the whole site directly onto a CD. The advantage of this is that it may not need much alteration of your existing site, however there are limitations such as if a site uses a database or has other interactive functionality. Generally, this takes more time and effort to make work.
We’re often asked about CD-ROMs with databases on them to provide facilities such as search tools, data-driven brochure content or other product data. There are a number of options that are appropriate for different circumstances. These may be something as simple as copying HTML files onto a CD, using Macromedia Flash and building something bespoke, or taking a similar approach but use Macromedia Director. There are pros and cons of each option, which I’ve outlined below:
HTML Files
If you have a website, you may be able to put the whole site directly onto a CD. The advantage of this is that it may not need much alteration of your existing site, however there are limitations such as if a site uses a database or has other interactive functionality. Generally, this takes more time and effort to make work.
The other disadvantage of running normal web files from a CD-ROM is that without extra work they will generally run in the browser installed on the machine on which they’re being viewed. This relies on the end user’s computer being set up correctly and also doesn’t look as professional as the other options.
Macromedia Flash
Flash is a very good presentation tool and newer versions have very good scripting capabilities. Generally, writing a tool to work with a database requires quite a lot of bespoke programming work.
Macromedia Director
Director is much more powerful than Flash and generally performs much better for doing data-intensive operations. It is, however, like Flash, more of a tool for presentation than for data. Director is often the better choice for CD-ROMs, though, given its speed and flexibility, but it is not the easiest when it comes to adding interactive tools.
There are options, however, which fall into two categories:
- Writing bespoke data storing and search code
- Use a third party database engine compatible with Director
At Exponetic we’ve used both routes as were appropriate for each client, and in another post I’m going to run through the main principles of both.
Summary
There are a number of options for running an application similar to a website from a CD-ROM, and which one is right depends very much on where you’re starting from and the specifics of the application that’s going to be run. HTML, Flash and Director all have their place in the right circumstances.
August 18, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Filed in: Front-end, Programming
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3 August 2006, by Chris
The most interesting new applications of the past few years don't reside on the PC at all
I can’t believe this quote is from 1999, it seems to me just as relevant today.
[T]he most interesting new applications of the past few years don’t reside on the PC at all, but on remote Web servers. I’m talking about Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, Yahoo Maps and so on.
Tim O’Reilly,
Writing on Salon.com
August 3, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Filed in: Business & Management, Sales & Marketing
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3 August 2006, by Chris
I'll be setting up WordPress and then integrating existing XHTML and CSS into a WordPress theme.
So, the existence of this blog indicates that I’ve been reasonably successful in setting up a WordPress blog for the first time. I’ve heard a lot about the system before, but this is the first time I’ve got my hands dirty with WordPress.
We’ve already got a site set-up (exponetic.com) so I won’t be concerning myself with design, or building the CSS and XHTML with this post. I’ll simply be setting up WordPress and then integrating the existing XHTML and CSS into a WordPress theme. I’ll write up the theme creation when I get a minute.
The WordPress site and general operation seems good (what you would expect from a modern open source effort), although I’m not totally convinced by the design and it’s often inordinately large font, but so be it. I guess it’s meant to be good for usability.
The download and install seemed to me very simple. They boast a ‘famous five minute install’ which (as long as you’re confident on the Linux command line) is reasonably true.
I’m using a Debian server. I log in as the www-data user (so everything is owned by the right user when I set things up) and then cd to make sure I’m in my home directory, which should be /var/www. As the site is already set up, I’m going to make a blog/ directory to house the blog. After navigating to the htdocs site directory, I make the directory mkdir blog and then cd blog into it.
So now I need to download WordPress.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
You should see the file download.
Then unzip it. tar -xvvzf latest.tar.gz
Then set up your database and finish the install. All this is covered on the official WordPress web site.
Next, I’ll look at the re-skinning process, but that will have to wait for another post.
August 3, 2006 at 10:14 am
Filed in: Design, Front-end, PHP, MySQL, Open Source
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