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Establishing an ecommerce site involves many challenges. In the first of a series of V7 articles on the subject, we hope to shed some light on the tools and processes that underpin this critical new business area. In the future we'll discuss middleware, credit card authorization, security, and ESD (electronic software delivery). We begin by taking a look at the database and a special image adaptation that may be ideally suited for your on line enterprise.
Traditional databases have not handled images very well, and it's only recently that they have begun to include image object types in their data structures. Even if they have the capability to store images natively, there is little to satisfy the web demands of an ecommerce application. These databases do not have any batch preparation facility to resample and compress files for the web, nor do they recognize the need to display multiple image sizes (thumbnails, full screen) for different views of an online catalog.
The solution to these shortcomings may exist in the specialized databases developed for digital asset management. Over the past two years asset management software has been widely hyped for its huge potential, but so far the market has not lived up to its advance billing. Designed from the ground up to organize, store and retrieve images, these applications are ideally suited to the ecommerce challenge. Here's how.
Your product catalog must include photographs of individual items. You would also like to offer users enlarged views to see patterns, textures and detail to support their buying decisions and reduce the likelihood of returns. The image database builds its record set from a directory of original images (in many supported formats, bmp, wmf, tif etc.) It typically offers three data views, thumbnail (small image), individual record (large image) and spreadsheet. It automatically records information about the image's size, file type and bit depth. It usually has a number of default fields associated with each record (name, creator, description, and creation date) and the capability to add any number of custom fields including text,
number, date and boolean types.
The image database is simple to administer allowing users to easily update single images or the whole image collection without affecting non-image record data. If one of your products changes color or a better original photograph becomes available; it is a straightforward revision process. These tools also include complex sort and search
capabilities to help manage large record sets and each record can be tagged from a defined keyword list.
Developers have designed these databases to publish their recordsets to HTML in a variety of ways. All output static HTML pages from highly customizable template files (often stored externally for remote editing), and create the supporting web images as .jpgs or .pngs from the high-resolution originals. Some are fully dynamic with webserver
plugins that read the database file and stream images to the web. And best of all, store their data in ODBC tables, so that they can integrate with other database systems and be accessed by middleware tools. All-in-all, very powerful software.
V7 has already built and deployed a solution using the dynamic web server model for The Campbell Group. Organizations will find these databases powerful enough to manage thousands of records, simple to administer with their image-centric approach, and perfect for rapid application development.
- Michael Robertson
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