WebEdge 95
Volume Number: 11
Issue Number: 10
Column Tag: From The Field
WebEdge Conference Report 
What really happened when the lights went out?
By Jon Wiederspan, jon@comvista.com
WebEdge II happened in Austin, Texas last week (August 20 - 24) and the city seems
none the worse for the wear. WebEdge I was held last spring at the Apple offices in
Austin, where 100 attendees squeezed into a space that probably wasn’t rated by the
fire department for that load. Obviously it was successful, because WebEdge II had
over 300 attendees and many of them had been at the first conference. To handle the
load, the conference was moved to the Austin Convention Center, which seemed much
more spacious, especially when you had to hoof it from a class at one end of the halls to
a lab session far away at the other end. Ten different rooms had classes going all day on
various topics and an extremely well-stocked Hack lab occupied the far end. A latté
stand marked the center point of the hall for those who found their energy levels
flagging, although coffee doesn’t seem to have the same importance in Austin (yet) that
it has had for years in Seattle.
About the Lights
The conference was planned well and provided more opportunities for information and
meeting people than any one person could take full advantage of. In future years,
though, the thing that will stick most in people’s minds will be the one unplanned event
- a power outage. I was working in the Hack lab at the time, as were about a dozen
other people on the 30 or 40 computers available (depending on whether you counted
the portables or not), when the lights first faded, then flickered several times, and
finally went off altogether. Needless to say this didn’t do a lot of good for anyone’s
work in progress, and the computer monitors also sounded as if they would definitely
have preferred a more polite method of powering down. The only people who escaped
were those using portables that had some battery reserve. One user expressed the
thought that maybe plugging in his machine was the final straw for the electrical
system in the building, but I personally suspected that the Convention Center was
designed a little better than that.
The power fluctuations played havoc with the fire alarms, so the next thing we
new we were all being ushered out of the building until someone found out what had
actually happened. It being late afternoon, many of us now faced for the first time the
brutal truth of summer in Austin, Texas. Inside, the building had been a comfortable
68 degrees and humidity was, of course, no problem. In fact, several people had
complained that it might be a little bit too cold in the building. Outside it was
somewhere around 95 degrees and at least 75% humidity, not something this Seattle
boy is accustomed to. The complaints stopped at once and I didn’t hear them for the rest
of the conference. A gentle Austin drizzle started minutes later and completed the
experience.
Everyone was able to enter the building again after a short wait, power returned
after maybe half an hour, and everything returned to normal with classes running
slightly late. Reports were that a lightning strike had taken out power for the entire
city grid. Unfortunately, this included the University of Texas-Austin which provided
the network connection we needed to reach the rest of the world. The network was down
and, with both e-mail and Web services unavailable, the Hack lab quickly lost interest.
In retrospect, though, the power outage probably helped much more than it hurt. No
matter how exciting a presentation is, you can only sit through so many in a single day,
and more than one presenter had been hearing soft snoring sounds in the classrooms.
Now, WebEdge II will be remembered as “the one where the lights went out”.
What is WebEdge?
For those who don’t know, WebEdge is the conference for Macintosh webmasters and
developers. For three days attendees witnessed presentations on new software for use
with Web servers, on Web design and maintenance issues, and on how to write software
for Web servers in several languages. Evenings brought the Birds-of-a-Feather
sessions on various topics, from the best way to write HTML documents to the future of
the Web itself. Interspersed with all of this were sessions in the Hack lab,
opportunities to meet the people who own the names that keep appearing in the
MacHTTP-talk mailing list, and some fine meals at a few of Austin’s many fine eating
places. Personally, I loved the IronWorks, located only a couple of blocks from the
Convention Center. It had great ribs and an extremely informal atmosphere that
reminded me of some of my favorite places in the small towns of northeastern
Washington.
There were two tracks to the conference. The first track was for webmasters and
focused on design, content, and pre-built solutions, although it included a course on
writing CGI applications in AppleScript (by yours truly). Speakers included Martin
Haeberli (Apple’s Internet Wizard), John Hardin (author of MacWeb), Chuq Von
Rospach (list-mom for the Apple Internet mailing lists), Robert Best (author of
World Wide Web Weaver), and some twenty other Web folks of equal prominence. The
second track was for Web developers, including many webmasters but primarily those
who develop their own software solutions to customize client sites. Classes in this
track emphasized programming and service provider topics such as writing CGI
applications in C, the HTML and HTTP standards, and Internet Service Provider issues
and answers. Some speakers from the first track spoke here too; new faces included
Mason Hale (author of the CGI interface for Frontier), Jaeson Engle (of MIND fame),
and, of course, Chuck Shotton (author of WebSTAR and MacHTTP).
This WebEdge was sponsored by Apple Computer, Inc., Power Computing,
Starnine Technologies, Maxum Development, Delphic Software, Connectix, Adobe
Systems, Inc., Everyware Development Corp., Bungee, and MacTech Magazine.
The WebHack Contest
The Hack lab was equipped with about 30 computers, an equal mix of Apple
PowerMacintosh computers and Power Computing clones. I enjoyed the opportunity to
give the Power Computing stuff a workout and I couldn’t find a single flaw, although the
Ikegami 17-inch monitors were a bit hard on the eyes. Although everyone was allowed
to use the lab, only Web developers were allowed to enter the Hack contest. The contest
rules were loosely based on those from the MacHack conference, with the exception
that the lab closed at midnight (because of Convention Center rules). Given the number
of attendees carrying a portable of some kind, that wasn’t much of a problem. The top
prizes were a PowerMacintosh 8150 Internet Server bundle and a Power Computing
Power 100. Other prizes were provided by Metrowerks, StarNine, Main Event
Software, Everyware, Bungee, and Ceneca, who all gave away full versions of their
software, and Connectix who gave away three QuickCams.
The hack entries covered a wide variety of topics and ranged from purely fun to a
future commercial product. The winning entry by Katy Agnor of The ForeFront Group,
Inc. (http://www.ffg.com/) fell in the latter category. The entry was called Web
Pirate, and its primary purpose was to grab pages off of a remote site and copy the
entire page, including inline graphics, to your local site with all links intact. It first
checked the Netscape cache to see if you already had the page downloaded, which is a big
help on low-bandwidth sites. The final version should allow you to choose between
designating a range of pages to get or grabbing entire site. Since copyright is a very
sensitive issue on the Web right now, the final version should also have some method
for a site specifically to allow such activity - and probably a name less suggestive of
theft!
The runner-up (by Chris Esther) was a CGI application that fed logging data on
the fly to a 4D database which would then output a real-time report of the top ten
visited pages (you could filter out specific file types like GIF graphics) and the ten
computers that most often visited your site. Christopher Utley created a CGI
application in Frontier that allowed pages to be created, deleted, or edited on a site via
a Web page. Stephen Banks created an AppleScript script that would convert a
QuickTime movie into multiple GIF images which could be served as an animation on a
Web site using the server-push feature (this will be a new feature on the XFiles site
http://www.neosoft.com/sbanks/xfiles/xfiles.html, which Stephen
maintains). John O’Fallon used NetCloak (his company’s product,
http://www.maxum.com/maxum/) to create a server that had multiple unique home
pages, although his trick would only work with Netscape and NCSA Mosaic clients.
Mason Hale created a four-player game called “Tubin’!” using images of actual
attendees who had preceded the conference with a tubing trip to beat the Austin heat.
Jaeson Engle created a CGI application called MIND Controller that allowed new entries
to be added to a MIND server via a Web page. Kelly Campbell stole the show, though,
with a simple animation of a standard WebEdge pocket protector (all attendees got
them) from which Chuck Shotton suddenly popped out.
All of the entries should be available soon from the WebEdge site at
http://www.webedge.com/, along with entries from the previous conference.
Conference Highlights
Ceneca Communications was the darling of the show with their soon-to-be-released
products, PageMill and SiteMill. PageMill is an HTML editor that goes to another level
beyond the current crop of editors. The interface is much like that of any word
processor, but has HTML as the underlying language. PageMill completely hides the
HTML tags from the user unless non-standard features such as Netscape and proposed
HTML-3 tags are desired. PageMill also makes good use of drag-and-drop for making
links and inserting inline graphics. SiteMill includes PageMill functionality but
enhances that with site management capabilities. SiteMill checks a site for dead links
and other common errors at the startup. Once the links are fixed, SiteMill maintains
them even if a file is renamed or moved to another folder. Fixing a link can be as easy
as dragging a new file over the link to reconnect it to the proper page. Ceneca
Communications has promised a pre-release version of PageMill for the many people
who were ready to buy it even in alpha form. More information is available from
Ceneca’s Web site at http://www.ceneca.com/.
Robert Best (of Best Enterprises, http://www.student.potsdam.
edu/web.weaver/about.html) also introduced a complete rewrite of his popular
HTML Web Weaver, an HTML editor written in Prograph. The new product is called
World Wide Web Weaver, and has several new HTML features. The biggest change is
the addition of an interface for automatically generating CGI application code to process
forms. The new interface will create CGIs that can take form information and send it
out via e-mail, send it to a database, or create a new HTML document, depending on the
plug-in used. The software is still in alpha and can be downloaded from Best’s Web
page.
The next version of MacWeb was revealed by John Hardin under his new company
name, TradeWave Corporation (http://galaxy.tradewave.com/). TradeWave,
formerly EINet, is aiming MacWeb and a collection of related security products at the
corporate market that needs a very high level of security. In addition to authorizing
the server (so the client knows that the server it thinks it is talking to is the one it
actually is talking to), the new system will authorize the client to provide another
level of protection for handing out sensitive information. The system will also provide
encryption of data transmitted between client and server, and will be offered as a
toolkit that can be incorporated into other client-server products to make them
Web-enabled and secure for Internet use.
Kee Nethery (Apple Computer) and Jaeson Engle (The Jourvian Group) both
presented their Domain Name Server products for Macintosh OS, respectively named
MacDNS and MIND. Both are able to be primary DNS servers and can be configured to
create RAICs (virtual servers with multiple machines answering to the same DNS
name). MacDNS has not been released yet by Apple, but it should go into beta testing
soon and be shipping in winter as part of the Internet server bundle. MIND is freely
available now as alpha software and has been performing very well on many sites.
MIND also has the ability to be a secondary DNS server, which MacDNS hasn’t at this
time. On the other hand, MacDNS has by far the friendlier interface for configuration
and management.
Starnine Technologies displayed their latest update to WebSTAR, version 1.2,
which performs 30 - 50% better than version 1.1 and twice as fast as version 1.0
(which is currently on the Apple Internet Server bundle). In addition to the speed
improvement, version 1.2 adds support for “server-push”, a feature introduced by
the NetSite servers from Netscape Communications Corp. Server-push allows the
server to keep a connection open indefinitely and pump data through at intervals,
which can be used for creating animation effects or for regularly updated information
such as a stock ticker. Version 1.2 also added support for “raw” files that are
returned by a server without processing and is safe to use under OpenTransport (1.05
or later). Chuck Shotton warned that performance would be decreased when using
OpenTransport because the ethernet drivers are not yet PowerPC-native and there are
still some OT bugs to be worked out. As a side note, several people reported installing
Connectix Corporation’s SpeedDoubler on their PowerMacintosh servers and getting a
noticeable speed increase; SpeedDoubler improves emulator performance when
accessing files, which is a lot of what a Web server does. John O’Fallon reported that
his server, with SpeedDoubler installed, was handling more than 200 connections per
minute (264,000 connections per day). Chuck Shotton said that their testing had the
figure at closer to 350 connections per minute.
Several database connectivity solutions were displayed by Everyware
Development Corporation (http:// www.everyware.com/), ForeSight Technology
(http:// www.fsti.com/), and Eric Bickford (http:// www.macweb.com/).
Everyware has an update to their product ButlerLink/Web, which provides an
easy-to-use interface between a Macintosh Web server and their Butler SQL database.
The new product is called Tango and is not only faster than the previous product (it is
now written in C instead of AppleScript) but also has several new features such as a
“shopping basket” that lets you save up selections from previous searches for later
action. Tango obviates the need to know SQL, and generates all of the HTML forms (the
user need only provide a header and footer). Everyware announced plans to add ODBC
support to future versions of Tango, which would allow it to talk directly to any
database that supports ODBC. ForeSight demonstrated their product, NetLink/4D,
which turns your 4D server into a CGI application that can communicate directly with
a Macintosh Web server. NetLink/4D extends the 4D programming language so all of
the flexibility is still available. NetLink/4D is very fast and provides support for
threading multiple connections. Eric Bickford showed his new product WEB FM, which
provides a simple interface for linking FileMaker databases to a Macintosh Web
server. WEB FM provides several methods for searching a FileMaker database
quickly, updating entries, and deleting entries. Although WEB FM does not currently
generate the HTML form pages automatically, that ability is planned for a future
release.
Closing Address
The closing address was provided by Bill Enright, who demonstrated his product
Whurlwind, which he is developing jointly with John Louch of Apple Computer (this is
not an Apple product). Whurlwind is a VRML 1.0 viewer for Macintosh computers. It
works by converting VRML 1.0-compliant files to QuickDraw 3D scenes and objects
that can be manipulated with the QuickDraw 3D interface. VRML has gained a lot of
attention because it allows a three-dimensional space to be described in a small file
relative to a QuickTime VR image of the same space. In addition, the 3D model allows
the user to travel around in the scene, whereas QuickTime VR may constrain the user’s
freedom of motion. Internet links can be embedded in objects in the scene, although this
feature was not working perfectly in the demonstration version. Bill warned users
that the software is definitely still a hack (which he considers a compliment), will
run only on PowerMacintosh computers (because it requires QuickDraw 3D), and
needs about 32 MB RAM to run. Even given those limitations, I don’t think I was the
only one to download a copy to take home.