Creating local content

[Ernest Perez]

You might also want to check out GDIdb at <http://www.gdidb.com>. Economical in
$$$ and in software-skills, plus cheaper yet for non-profits.  It's a powerful,
high-level macro scripting language that's decently easy to pick up. I mean a
couple of hours, not weeks. Plus it has a script wizard that writes basic code,
which you can then pretty up for prime time. Uses Access or any ODBC-compliant
database as the underlying database engine.

Rather than trying to act as a CPU-cruncher dynamic update, the scripting
language can do scheduled automatic updates (or ad hoc), including automatic
uploading/refreshing files on the Web site host machine. This takes away the
instant update power need, and substitutes regular updating of HTML files and
tables.

See their customer implementation list, a couple of interesting examples. For a
quickie of the kind of implementation power you can have with not too much
effort, note Ohio State Univ's "Worldwide Directory of Finance Faculty and
Professionals" at <http://fisher.osu.edu/fin/findir/>. This example lets you do
easy multi-access search on a file of several thousand entries.

Cheers,
--ernest
Ernest Perez, Ph.D.
Oregon State Library

"How does GDIdb work? The core of GDIdb is a script language that combines a
   custom (Perl-like) script syntax with ultra-high level script functions that
are
   specifically aimed at Internet/Database scripting tasks. A single GDIdb
script
   function is all that is needed for each of the following tasks:
   1/ Generate and iterate through a database recordset created from an SQL
query,
   merging database data with HTML.
   2/ Send an e-mail, which may consist of text, database and script-generated
data
   via SMTP (GDIdb Pro only).
   3/ Receive e-mails (via POP3) and make the e-mail data available for further
script
   processing or insertion into a database (GDIdb Pro only).
   4/ Submit data to a web server CGI script or gather web document or document
   status information via HTTP GET or POST (GDIdb Pro only)."