Roisin Woolnough meets the architect of a site that puts essential
travel information within clicking distance
Roisin Woolnough meets the architect of a site that puts
essential travel information within clicking distanceWhen Excite UK and the Rough Guides joined forces to provide
travel information online, the hardest challenge for Stephen
Barrett, production engineer on the project, was to create a
user-friendly experience.
A wealth of information was necessary for the service, but it
all had to be instantly accessible to users. Barrett feels this was
achieved. "Although a lot of work goes on in the background - the
feeds, the search daemon, the HTML generation - the user is simply
presented with an easy to use and easy to navigate page of
information," he says.
The Excite travel channel disseminates the usual Rough Guides
information, such as where to go and what to eat and visit in more
than 14,000 destinations worldwide.
The data is sent from Rough Guides to Excite in XML, a language
that Barrett says is ideal for his purposes. "Like the other
well-known markup language HTML, XML uses tags to format data.
However, unlike HTML, XML has very few predefined tags, instead
allowing you to define your own tags. The power of XML is that it
allows data to be associated with context and meaning, making it
much easier to store and transmit information, rather than just
data."
To prevent users from having to wade through reams of
information, Excite runs back-end processes known as feeds. These
feed the information to Web servers. "These feeds are written
primarily in Perl, an interpreted scripting language that is very
easy to use, is very extensible and has powerful text processing
methods," says Barrett.
Most of the work on the feeds had already been carried out by
the US service, which made Barrett's task easier. He says another
important function of the feeds is indexing files and building the
search index. This index is used by one of Excite's search daemons
to enable users to search for cities by name.
The site runs on powerful Unix servers, with the feeds running
on a separate server. The daemon also runs on a separate server, to
avoid overloading the Web servers. The Web server is Netscape
Enterprise, running with customised plug-ins, software modules that
it uses to interpret the templates and data to generate the final
HTML. A proprietary language was used to present the pages.
www.excite.co.uk/travel/destinations
Curriculum vitae
Name: Stephen Barrett
Age: 21
Job title: production engineer
Qualifications: BSc in computer science from the
University of Strathclyde
IT skills: HTML, XML, Javascript, Perl, C, C++, Java,
SQL, PHP, Linux, Excel, Access
Hobbies: badminton, swimming, reading
Favourite pub: The Counting House, Glasgow
Favourite film: Leon
Favourite book: The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Barrett on Barrett: serious, surreal, simple
E is for excellence
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