Message-Id: <199602010212.UAA15367@library.wustl.edu> Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 18:07:30 -0800 From: Andrzej Kowalski <mailto:andrzej@DINGO.COM> Subject: Re: WebPAC and ALS/Vmark licenses To: Multiple recipients of list WEBCAT-L <mailto:WEBCAT-L@WUVMD.WUSTL.EDU>
At 11:24 01/31/96 -0600, you wrote: >On Wed, 31 Jan 1996, Lori A. Schwabenbauer, Camden County Library wrote:
>
>> the abovementioned products. However, our concern about licensing is the
> same.
>> DRA tells me that whether the user is on the Web, telnetting, in-house,
> dialup,
>> or whatever, if they're in our catalog they're using a license. Additional
>> licenses are costly (as I'm sure they are for every vendor). But we want
>
>Does the fact that HTTP is a "connectionless" protocol (and so,
>presumably, the amount of time that webcat clients actually tie up user
>licenses should be shorter than with session-oriented connections like
>telnet) have any impact on the webcat licensing situation, or do most of
>the commercial webcat's use connection-oriented sessions? If my ignorance
>of commercial webcat products makes my question moot, please feel free to
>turn it into "How do the commercial webcat's handle "connection-oriented"
>sessions?". This might be of general interest anyway.
>
>P.S. I know that there also home grown web interfaces to OPAC's, but I
>assume that they don't generally present licensing concerns.
>
>
>Scott Salzman (507) 646-3635
>Systems Librarian mailto:salzman@stolaf.edu
>St. Olaf College Libraries
>Northfield, MN, USA
>
Our KE Texpress database system uses a licensing method more consistent with the stateless nature of the Web. In fact, the way we licence provides huge financial incentives for organizations to implement a WWW user interface for their collections database applications.This example is based on a real-life client that gets well over 100,000 hits per month. It works something like this:
* You buy a 5, 10, 15, 50 or whatever size Texpress concurrent user licence you require. This client has a 15 user licence. * You dedicate some e.g. 12 out of 15 licences, to run our texhtmlserver program which acts as the intermediary between a Texpress database and the WWW via standard Web forms. The remaining 2 licences in this example would be kept for systems admin, applications development etc. * You now have 12 active instances of the tehtmlserver program each using one licence slot. * Each texhtmlserver process listens for database transaction requests passed from httpd. * As requests arrive, a free texhtmlserver process (that is one not busy serving other requests) answers the request, passes the query to the database and returns the results to httpd. The texhtmlserver process is then free to answer additional requests. Due to the speed of the Texpress engine, database requests are typically processed in fractions of a second, even from collections with many millions of records. * If all texhtmlserver processes are busy answering database requests, texhtmlserver will queue database requests to a total queue length equal to the number of texhtmlserver processes running. In this example, we could support 12 active database requests and 12 queued requests. if all texhtmlserver process are busy and the queue is full the user will get a customizable message saying all database servers are busy and to try again later.
The end result is that a small concurrent user licence can service a large organization if a Web interface is used to the database. The organization does not even have to be connected to the Internet to use these tools.
We have another client, a government agency, that has 50+ staff and numerous regional branch offices accessing the same Texpress databases on their LAN and via the Internet with a 2 user licence. Traditionally, in a connection-based licence enviornment, this organization might require a 20 or 30 user licence.
So the economic incentives are quite substantial to adopt a Web-based interface to a Texpress database.
Andrzej Kowalski ################ Andrzej Kowalski Vancouver, BC, Canada Dingo Software Systems Inc. Tel: (604) 877-1960 mailto:andrzej@dingo.com Fax: (604) 877-1961 http://www.dingo.com
Fast and flexible data retrieval from data collections of all sizes in-house and on the WWW with the KE Texpress object oriented database. ###############