IBM Easy Website Builder
An Eclipse-based tool that enables non-technical business users to build dynamic Web sites without assistance from technical developers.
Date Posted: September 7, 2005
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This is an  technology.
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What is the IBM Easy Website Builder?
The IBM Easy Website Builder is test project whose creators request that businessmen download, test, and vote on it, adding their own suggestions and recommendations and requesting that IBM complete this project (all this can be done at the "Reviews" tab on this site).
IBM Easy Website Builder is an integrated tool that allows businessmen, as well as any users with no technical skills, to develop their Web presence with no need for or dependency upon a technical person. Site creation is done using business and content terminology delivered through a visual interface, without the user's having to write code or get into low-level technical terms. Using its smart components, users can show through the Web what their company does and what they have to offer to their customers. They can easily present stored information about their business and gather information from site visitors.
How does it work? When the user opens the tool, he is greeted by a wizard that allows him to create a Web site from scratch using predefined site layouts or from a predefined sample site. In this wizard, the user selects generic site attributes such as color scheme, logo, and navigation bar links. After this short wizard is finished, a complete Web site that the user can further edit is created.
The user can now use a simple Web page editor to place various texts, images, links, and tables, as well as smart components that interact with business information stored in a database (in the future, other data sources will also be usable). When the user defines the data for these components, the tool creates, "under the covers," database tables with the matching schemata. The content of the tables may later be modified using a wizard. The tool also writes the necessary scripts for creating the matching tables on a production database and even the scripts for filling in the values that the user entered into his local database (to be executed by the deployer of the site).
A site preview is updated dynamically to let the user browse the site in progress. The user can also test his site on the Tomcat Web server included with the tool. When the site is ready for publishing, the user can click on a button to create a file and publish it to his own server or send it to the IT representative for deployment to his server.
The IBM Easy Website Builder, which was built using Eclipse technology, is bundled with a complimentary open-source database (Apache Derby) and Web application server (Apache Tomcat); these inclusions reduce the total cost of ownership. The tool may also be configured to work with other databases such as IBM DB2 and other Web application servers such as IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS).
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| | About the technology author(s):
The IBM Easy Website Builder was developed by the RAD Technologies Group at IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel. This group focuses on making IT easy and on developing technologies in this area, some of which extend the open-source Eclipse framework. Using these technologies allows developers as well as non-technical people to perform IT tasks easily and quickly and to improve their productivity, quality of applications, and speed to market.
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