A ThrottleBox.com page with Box files featuring musical artist Madonna ThrottleBox Rocks With Empress The Internet can serve as a powerful tool in showcasing the capabilities of software applications. To demonstrate the potential of ThrottleBox, SpectraNet's recent application, the company created an entertaining and informative web site developed with the Empress RDBMS V8.10 running on Linux.     ThrottleBox consists of a Web-based, multimedia ThrottleBox Player which plays Box files, the player's unique file format. The player acts like an all-in-one text and image browser, television and VCR. A front-end graphical user interface, with control buttons like a VCR, makes it simple to use.     ThrottleBox can serve as an asset in any field in which the relay of information through various forms of media via a single format is useful. In this respect, the application is unique. When a user downloads a Box file, all data including supporting text, images and video come encapsulated in a single Box file format. Furthermore, hyperlinks within the texts and images in the Box files are present.     Currently, SpectraNet provides the downloadable ThrottleBox Player and music video Box files on its web site. The Empress RDBMS manages a variety of information that feeds data into the ThrottleBox web site. The site exploits one of the key strengths of the Empress RDBMS: the ability to handle large amounts of data with speed.     All the information required for downloading Box files on the web site is managed by the Empress RDBMS. This includes album titles and descriptions, and runtime data. In addition, all biographical and promotional information about featured musical artists is stored by Empress. For internal purposes, demographic data is also stored when users register for a ThrottleBox Player.     SpectraNet's choice to use the Empress RDBMS was largely based on the development team's previous positive experience using Empress's products. Empress's low cost was an added plus point.     SpectraNet provides users with the ability to create their own Box files as well via the ThrottleBox Assembly Tool Gold package. Text , audio files, images and MPEG videos can all be laid-out to custom build Box files.     ThrottleBox exemplifies how the Empress RDBMS's capabilities can be well-utilized to create inventive, database-fed Web pages that can serve as an interesting arena to promote products. To download a ThrottleBox Player and Box files, consult www.throttlebox.com.

Hypermedia: Evolution of the Toolkit Empress is on a continuous path to advance the capabilities of Empress Hypermedia, the Internet Application Development Toolkit. The latest version has relaxed its past dependencies on HTML. The toolkit can now be used to generate text based documents such a VCard, Rich Text, and XML markups such as MathML.     In addition, Persistent Stored Modules (PSM) have become powerful weapons in the web developers arsenal. They can be used for: on-the-fly data modifications, translation of dates to various languages, conversion from ASCII to non-ASCII codesets, escape from SGML/HTML special characters, conversion of plain text to HTML, and escape from text to enable manipulation by JavaScript.     Another recent development is Empress's compatibility with PHP (see www.php.net). This scripting language can generate HTML documents from scripts. PHP can operate as a CGI, as FastCGI, or an Apache module.     Lastly, there is Java. Empress's involvement with JDBC started in early 1997 when the Empress ODBC client driver was made compatible with Javasoft's JDBC-ODBC bridge.     Realizing that Empress can not depend on a 3rd party for such an important interface, Empress released Empress JDBC Driver v1.0 in early 1998. This is a Category 2 Driver (mixed Java and C) ideal for developing servlets or Java applications in homogenous environments. Later, with the release of Empress JDBC Driver v1.1 Empress added an optional pure Java client using a three-tier distributed architecture. It can be used in applets or heterogenous distributed environments. For more information about Empress Hypermedia, consult HyperAction, a new column on the Empress Web.

For information on the products or companies covered in this newsletter, please contact Empress Software by telephone, fax, or e-mail, using any of the numbers listed below:

Empress Software Inc. 6401 Golden Triangle Drive Greenbelt, Maryland USA 20770 Tel: (301) 220-1919 Fax: (301) 220-1997 E-mail: sales@empress.com

Empress Software Inc. 3100 Steeles Avenue East Markham, Ontario Canada L3R 8T3 Tel: (905) 513-8888 Fax: (905) 513-1668 E-mail: sales@empress.com