Behind the pretty pictures is a well-designed site that could save
the day for lotharios who every year forget February 14th
Love was most definitely in the air at Levelfive Online Solutions
when Flowergram.co.uk went live, writes
Roisin Woolnough. In
order to ensure that the site was working properly before it
launched, one of the developers offered to do the honourable thing
and went online to order a bunch of flowers for a colleague he had
his eye on. The flowers arrived, were much appreciated and the
couple have since been on a date.
This heart-warming tale should encourage any shy admirers to
take the plunge this week and make their feelings known. Dave
Cooke, senior developer at Levelfive Solutions, who helped set up
the site, certainly hopes there will be a lot of traffic in the
coming few days.
Cooke, who was one of four people working on the site, says
everything went very smoothly and they even managed to complete a
couple of weeks early - just in time to catch a few late Christmas
shoppers.
The site runs on a dual Pentium II processor NT machine. The Web
server is a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4. Cooke
says IIS was chosen because it is easy to administer and is widely
supported. Application server Tango Enterprise 3 was also chosen
for practical reasons.
"Tango works in tandem with a database, a Web server and an
e-mail server. It makes the creation, modification and maintenance
of even the most complex Web sites relatively simple," explains
Cooke.
Cooke wanted to use an application that could be easily
understood by people who have limited technical knowledge. "The
logic within the Tango application files is categorised into
presentation logic, business logic and database logic, making it
much more organised and an easier environment to work with. With
the business logic itself, the code is procedural, making it
extremely easy to follow the flow of the application.
"This is important for me as a programmer but is also very
useful to my graphic design and project management colleagues as
they can see what the application is doing and when at a glance,"
Cooke adds.
Employing Tango also meant that Cooke could get by without any
SQL skills. If he had used an application like Cold Fusion he would
have needed SQL expertise to modify database functionality. "Due to
Tango's open architecture we can deploy applications that run on
our IIS server or at a client site on their server platforms, be
they Unix or Macintosh based," he explains.
curriculum vitae
Name: Dave Cooke
Age: 32
Job: senior developer at Levelfive Online Solutions
Qualifications: did two years of a computing degree
course, then quit for a hands-on programming job
IT skills: DBMS, Tango, HTML, Javascript
Hobbies: hiking, surfing, computer games and drinking
Favourite film: The Punisher
Cooke on Cooke: intelligent, sexy, hard