 Project Summary
The Next Page Audiobooks online evolved from a mail order audiobooks business to
an online retail company selling books-on-tape direct to consumers, collectors,
and institutions. With hundreds of thousand of titles available in all the popular
genres (Fiction, Nonfiction, Business, History ...) audiobooks quickly became a
unique way to "read" while commuting, traveling, exercising, and during numerous
other hands-free activities.
The Next Page Audiobooks site offered a virtual shopping cart, audio streaming, US
and international order fulfillment and an elaborate search feature. Advanced
shopping cart features included "held" baskets, personalized customer requests,
SSL secured online credit card checkout, plus alternate mail/fax/call checkout
options.
The core system was written in Visual Basic utilizing O'Reilley Website web
server running on NT Server. We achieved a distributed workflow environment
utilizing existing Visual Basic programs for title maintenance that we had
written for the mail order side of the business. This was accomplished by
centralizing MS SQL Server, COM components, and executables on an NT Server
that communicated with client applications using DCOM. Client applications
would establish communications and upload the newly added title records from
the client's local MS Access database into SQL Server and synchronize the two
databases.
Backoffice MS Access processes were built to upload inventory data from audiobook
publishers and leading wholesalers Ingram Book Company and Baker & Taylor. Complex
queries were written to track orders from the online orders database against the
combined inventory database to assist in fulfillment and to manage backorders.
In these early days of e-commerce hardware wasn't as fast as it is today and NT
Server was in its first generation of Internet development tools. We were pushing
our box with many tricks that are the norm of high-scale websites today, such as
pre-caching HTML pages, streamlined HTML/graphics, client-side validation with JavaScript, saving
session states with hidden fields and cookies.
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