Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

DynaBase's supreme power lies in its document management. It stores all files in its webs. Extensive syntax, link checking and version control are integrated with the database. Lotus Domino also uses databases to store documents, but its files are not as easy to import and export. It is easy to migrate your old Web site into DynaBase, and migrate it back.

Each web is a logical collection of files, and multiple webs can be served from the same server to the public. Files are source-controlled in the webs, and links can be easily checked. When a document is requested, the correct version of the file is served. Since all the files are stored in a database, links can be automatically updated when a file is moved. DynaBase also offers an extensive syntax-checking feature--a feature Enterprise Server and Domino lack.

DynaBase's syntax checking reports errors against the document type definition (DTD) for each file type. A DTD defines the syntax for a markup language, such as HTML. There are different options for the va rious versions of HTML. Each version has its own DTD. DynaBase comes with four available DTDs for HTML. One is HTML according to the specification for HTML 2.0, while the others include extra tags from Netscape or Microsoft.

We set up DynaBase quickly and plugged it into Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) as an ISAPI plug-in. We then created a web and imported our real-world test site into it. It took some time to import the files (a task we left going overnight). In the morning, we were shocked to see that hundreds of files had failed to import--until we viewed the error messages. They very clearly indicated what was wrong with every file that had failed. The failures were all the result of bad HTML, such as missing end tags and body tags in the header. When we decided that we didn't want to fix all of the HTML errors, we imported the files into a different document type to avoid syntax checking. This let us bring the Web site up quickly to fix the syntax errors later.

Editing Various Versions DynaBase's best feature is its v ersion control. Netscape also supports limited version control; Lotus offers no version control. In DynaBase, all documents are automatically version-controlled; each time a file is checked in, the version is automatically incremented. The best part, however, is the use of editions. An edition references versions of all files. DynaBase automatically gives you two editions to choose from: the current, which references the latest version of each file, and the first, which references the first version of each file.

By default, the new edition will reference the current version of every file when the edition was created. You can change this by clicking on a document, selecting the version from the version tab and clicking on editions. There is nothing to keep you from serving multiple editions at the same time.

The editions also offer rollback capability. If the edition being served is corrupted by someone adding unfinished files, three mouse clicks will let you selec t and restore an older edition. During our tests, we made several changes to the Web site and created a new edition to reference these changes. No changes were visible to the outside world until we selected our new edition for publishing. All changes were made public at the same time. Not only does this capability provide a crisp update, but it also enables the team to split up tasks.

We had fun testing DynaBase's dynamic capabilities. All the products we tested supported scripting in multiple languages and database support through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). DynaBase is no exception, supporting server-side scripting in Java, Perl and Visual Basic as well as its own scripting language, which is processed by the application server. The really exciting stuff doesn't happen until you use DynaBase's custom tags, a twofold feature.

First, you can set up scripts to be triggered on any HTML tag. We installed one of the example scripts, which triggered on tags. Whenever an tag was encountered, it found the URL referenced in that anchor and checked the age of the link. If the link was less than 12 hours old, it inserted a fresh icon.

Dynamic capabilities don't stop there. You also can create your own tags if you want something to happen that isn't related to any existing tag. You can create an tag for a commercial site. A script would be called to replace this tag with the HTML code for the proper advertisement. Changing advertisements would require changing only one central script.