The big project at the day job went into a public beta today.

It is on online (web?) page builder.

The basic idea is you point and click at bits of a web page to edit them, so anyone who can point and click at things should be able to make web pages.

After a while using it web pages you can not point and click at tend to seem a bit flat and dead, so expect more of the same in the future!

My employers were one of the first companies in the online web page builder business with ZyWeb, which allows people with very little computing skill to produce a web page online without having to install any software, or know anything about HTML.

Whilst from a technology perspective the new system is very different from the old system, for the end user the concept is similar, in that they can create web pages without installing any software, or knowing anything about web pages beyond what a typical person who surfs the Internet knows. However with later releases we will be exposing more of the drag and drop features (you can play at that by floating things in the Synergie template), and adding more plug-in components, and creating more than just web pages.

As always one of the worst bugs was found half an hour after launch, and fixed within a few minutes, which I guess shows the advantage of a server based system in deploying software.

The new system owes a big debt to free software, being based on the Perl Catalyst framework, Postgres, the Dojo Javascript toolkit, Trimpath, running under Apache on Debian (using mod-fcgid), YDN browser flattening CSS etc etc, although it uses a proprietary graphics rendering subsystem. A sign of the times is it runs happily on one server (which isn't even dedicated 100% to this project, and one graphics server), rather than the cluster of machines that were used for the previous system, although that may have to scale up as we gain more users, and add more features.

The Firebug and web developer Add-ons for Firefox made it happen at least twice as quickly. IE 6 made it take twice as long, IE6 was also responsible for all the worst bugs we encountered. I now know why so many AJAX project just don't bother with supporting it despite it still being used by 40% of web surfers(?!).

The heavy reliance on Javascript and CSS means that it currently requires IE6, IE7 or Firefox. Although I dare say other Gecko based browsers may work, and I might persuade the bosses to support the latest WebKit (and thus Safari, and Konqueror), just as soon as browsers using that start gaining market share (or get released in the case of some of them!). I'd suggest anyone still using IE6, install Firefox ASAP, but that is like Internet surfing 101 advice.

Web standard compliance fanatics (well Mattl anyway) won't like it. All the clever stuff was done by Merlyn. Any oddities in the user interface are my fault - don't anyone make me touch CSS ever again - any pretty stuff was probably done by Mark, and the documentation by Nova and Rob. A couple of pieces were outsourced with varying degrees of success.

I'm not the marketing department, so I didn't say any of this, if anyone asks you guessed it all from the HTTP headers, or reading the (compressed) Javascript source.

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