Summary

Digital Creations used Zope as a front-end to Infoseek's Ultraseek Server, creating a solution that implemented News-Scan's subscription-based business model.

Case Facts

News-Scan is a system which provides subscription-based searches of press clippings, targeted at public affairs officers in state governments. The News-Scan team originally used Infoseek's Ultraseek Server to provide indexing and search services for the information. As Ultraseek Server was not able to provide a solution for the News-Scan business plan, Infoseek recommended they contact Digital Creations for integration services.

Problem

The primary stumbling block was that Ultraseek Server would not permit a cookie-based subscription model for performing searches. Moreover, News-Scan needed an architecture on which they could base customer signups and billing.

Solution

Digital Creations provided a solution that implemented News-Scan's business plan while retaining Ultraseek Server. When it became clear that Ultraseek Server did not provide the technical infrastructure to accomplish the business plan, Digital Creations turned to Zope!

The fundamental breakthrough that Zope provided was to turn Ultraseek Server's search engine into a "Database Adapter", as if it were a relational database. Then the Zope architecture becomes responsible for all Web interactions with the customers, thus supporting the business model.

With an Ultraseek Database Adapter, the News-Scan Zope application has an object which returns unformatted result data when given search critera. The Zope application then uses DTML and the other facilities in Zope to create a rich web experience. A very small amount of Python code was added to the Ultraseek Server installation that implemented the Zope Database Adapter protocol. This was all that was required for Zope to communicate with the Ultraseek Server over HTTP.

Subscriber information is maintained in an ODBC database. Since the service runs on Windows NT, the database is Microsoft Access. This allows Zope's user database model (which includes support for cookies) to be leveraged, while allowing reporting to be done with desktop tools.

The finished product meets the News-Scan requirements and makes the full architecture of Zope available for Ultraseek Server.