Of E-Commerce Web Sites and Fruitcake: Camelback Makes Good

Published: January 10, 2006

by Alex Woodie

You can have your fruitcake and eat it too, judging from Camelback Web Architects' latest promotion. Late last year, the Dallas software company announced it would be giving away free seats to liveSite Content Management Server, a Web application development tool designed to make it easier for non-technical personnel to create sophisticated Web sites. Web sites created with liveSite run on a variety of servers, including the iSeries, which is where the world's largest fruitcake company runs its e-commerce site.

liveSite Content Manager Server provides a framework for creating interactive Web sites that users can get up and running in as little as a day, and without spending a fortune assembling top-shelf programming talent. Low cost and ease of use are the operative goals for Camelback, which sells industry-specific versions of liveSite for businesses, schools, and churches, says Michael Wilson, chief executive.

"We took all the programming and scripting and put them together in such a way that you point and click and build the interaction that you want," Wilson says. "We have school teachers that use our software, and don't have any technical expertise, and no knowledge of HTML."

The liveSite development environment provides users with a range of basic building blocks for the things people typically want to do with Web sites, such as: publishing text, graphics, audio, and video; creating catalogs and order forms; selling products and processing credit cards; publishing e-mail newsletters and managing mailing lists; managing membership information and creating event listings; providing role-based access and setting up restricted-access Web pages; and setting up a search engine, among others.

People can use the WYSIWYG page editor included with the software, or use third-party tools, such as Microsoft Homepage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. The software can even interface with back-end databases, such as DB2/400 and other SQL-compliant data stores.

While users access the liveSite through the Web and update their Web site's content through a browser, applications developed with liveSite can either be hosted by Camelback, or hosted on the user's Web server. As a piece of software rooted in the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) infrastructure stack, liveSite applications can run on just about any server, including the iSeries native OS/400 operating system, Wilson says.

In fact, one of Camelback's biggest customers runs liveSite on an iSeries server. Collin Street Bakery, the largest fruitcake manufacturer in the world, contracted with Camelback several years ago to help with the development of an e-commerce Web site, www.collinstreet.com, to further expand its global fruitcake empire, which last year was responsible for the circulation of 40 million pounds of the delectable treat. Because the 108-year-old, Corsicana, Texas-based company is a "true Blue" shop, having moved from S/390 mainframes to OS/400 systems several years ago, the company wanted to keep all critical applications running on its iSeries systems to ensure availability. Camelback wrote an interface between Collin Street's OS/400-based procurement system and the liveSite software to allow them to communicate, Wilson says.

Wilson, a former IBM consultant, says he doesn't get many requests for writing custom links between liveSite Web servers and back-end OS/400 applications, but that the company does have experience with it. "The iSeries is an awesome product," Wilson says. "I'd love to have more AS/400 customers."

While liveSite may not have the array of adapters and connectors for the most popular OS/400 ERP application that are offered with competing Web development environments, liveSite Content Management Server brings its own benefits, including being based entirely on open standards, which brings portability and pricing advantages. After all, it's tough to beat free (unless you're talking about fruitcakes).

liveSite Content Management Server version 4.0 is available now. Users get the first seat free, while additional seats cost about $30. For more information, visit www.camelback.net.