This appendix contains a discussion of the conceptual
architecture employed in the design of the PortalProdigy
software. Most people don’t need or have
much interest in this information. It’s dry and unbearably detailed, even
according to the unbelievably stultifying standards of the manual-aficionado
community.
Unless you are the type of person who looks under the hood
before renting a car, asks for a list of ingredients when dining at a
restaurant, or wishes you knew how your favorite word processing program was
designed rather than just how to use it, you don’t need to read this. If you are among the few people who need to
assess the software architecture to alleviate security concerns or are just so plain
curious you read the dictionary for fun, this one’s for you!
A Brief Technical
Overview:
PORTALPRODIGY runs on the Microsoft Internet Information
Server (IIS). The program code that
comprises PORTALPRODIGY and that runs on IIS is primarily in the form of COM
objects and XML, XSLT and CSS that are used by the COM objects to render Web
pages. PORTALPRODIGY uses this code
along with data, to output HTML pages that are viewable in a Web Browser. The HTML pages that are sent to the Web
Browser contain a combination of XML, HTML, CSS, Images and Java Script.
For transmitting secure data, PORTALPRODIGY uses 128 bit SSL
Encryption with Certificates. The design
of PORTALPRODIGY as compiled COM objects running on the server provides a
higher level of security than commonly used server side scripting languages. A few lines of ASP script are used to call
the main COM object.
Data is stored in one of two formats, either within the
PORTALPRODIGY relational database or as a file on the PORTALPRODIGY server. Documents and images are stored as files and
all other data is stored in the relational database. For the relational database, PORTALPRODIGY is
capable of using either the Microsoft Jet Engine, Microsoft’s SQL Server or
MYSQL.
The remainder of this Chapter is being edited and will be
available in the near future.
Thank you for your interest in PortalProdigy.
