Many companies are building content on their web sites using tactics similar to Tom Sawyer’s, but in this case, both the site owners as well as the contributors benefit. The chore isn’t painting a picket fence, it is developing enough interesting, changing content so viewers will return to a site often. When multiple companies and groups contribute content, all benefit from increased viewership, yet until now, managing multiple contributors from various locations was prohibitively complex and expensive.

Ease of developing and managing full-content web sites is why TownSmith was created. Six different modules with different functions are available, enabling a non-technical web site administrator with the power of a WebObjects application, with “point and click” ease of use.

Challenge
Wade Nichols, COO for TownSmith, says, “We saw that most web sites had four or five main functions, so we set out to give developers a tool that would streamline the work of building and maintaining those functions.” The functions—templates, messaging, surveys and results, calendars, catalogues, and shopping baskets—are each designed to give unlimited performance to a site of any size. “Our TownSmith tools needed to be as functional for a small, local web site as for a huge, multinational enterprise site. That scalability and stability is why WebObjects is the core technology of the product,” he says.

“We wanted to be able to work with any company’s existing system,” he continues. “Most other application servers demand the use of proprietary software, so other platforms would limit our customer base. With a WebObjects platform, we can work with virtually any system, any database, or legacy system.”

Solution
WebObjects and its Enterprise Objects Framework provide a mature and proven foundation that the TownSmith frameworks build upon, allowing a person to develop community oriented sites in a fraction of the time needed to build them from scratch. “WebObjects and its object oriented technology allows our customers to realize improved productivity through code reuse as well as Object Oriented design strategies and patterns such as inheritance and polymorphism. Objective-C enables the basic design and implementation while Java wrappers allow Java developers to take advantage of the frameworks as well.” Pure Java versions of TownSmith are forthcoming.

TownSmith can be used with a wide variety of databases such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and any ODBC compliant databases like MS SQL Server. TownSmith can also be deployed on a wide variety of platforms including Sun Solaris, HP/UX, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Macintosh OS X Server. Nichols adds, “The functionality of TownSmith has been tested on all recent versions of major browser software packages for pc and Macintosh computers.”

Benefits
Each of the six modules has a long list of functional elements, but an example is TownSmith Messaging. “There are a number of electronic bulletin board packages out there, but TownSmith Messaging goes far beyond standard bulletin board functionality to include collapsible, fully-threaded messaging, unlimited board creation, a customizable interface, private boards, user identity tracking, moderation options, and thread moving,” he explains. “A user can even ask the system to notify them by e-mail when new messages are added to a thread they’re interested in.”

Nichols continues, “The TownSmith Messaging system turns regular users into return users, and that is the key to successful web sites.” Another function in TownSmith Messaging is that users can establish their own “message box” where only new messages from their threads of interest appear. This saves time and increases user satisfaction with the system.

“As online communities and businesses grow, WebObjects gives them the ability to grow as steadily as their customer base, with the ability to increase functionality at any time,” says Nichols.