ZyWeb
Encyclopedia
ZyWeb is an online webpage authoring tool, created and owned by ZyNet Ltd, and is currently at version 3.1. It was an early adopter of an entirely server-based solution. ZyWeb was created to enable non-technical users to create and publish web sites without the need for any design, authoring or technical skills.

Formed by two experienced Directors of successful software and Internet companies, ZyWeb boasts a combined experience of over 30 years in managing software programs and Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 companies.

History

ZyWeb is one of the earliest on-line applications and has been in service since 1998. The initial development was by two British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 companies with a common background in the world of Acorn
Acorn
The acorn, or oak nut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives . It usually contains a single seed , enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and borne in a cup-shaped cupule. Acorns vary from 1–6 cm long and 0.8–4 cm broad...

 computers, part of the ancient history of personal computing
Computing
Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...

. Xara
Xara
Xara is a UK-based software company founded in 1981. It has developed software for a variety of computer platforms, in chronological order: The Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Z88, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Microsoft Windows and Linux. It was originally called Computer Concepts, Ltd.; the company name...

 Ltd (www.xara.com), which had grown out of Computer Concepts, brought their experience with vector graphics to provide what remains one of ZyWeb's USPs, its "smart graphics". ZyNet Ltd (www.zynet.net), which had grown out of Minerva Software, brought their experience as one of the earliest ISPs in the UK. Once the product was launched, the two companies joined to form a new company, known as Zy.com, and this company followed the all-too-familiar progress of so many others during the dot com bubble of the 1990s. A something-for-nothing business model drove explosive growth in the user base, with numbers in the millions at its peak. Venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 was attracted and millions of dollars were burned before the bubble burst and Zy.com collapsed. However, unlike so many other services, ZyWeb survived this period intact. One of the original founders, ZyNet Ltd, purchased the assets from the liquitated company and continued to develop and improve the service with a more viable business model.

Technical Information

ZyWeb is founded on a Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 platform, using ASP
Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages , also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated Web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic...

/VBScript
VBScript
VBScript is an Active Scripting language developed by Microsoft that is modeled on Visual Basic. It is designed as a “lightweight” language with a fast interpreter for use in a wide variety of Microsoft environments...

 to wrap up custom COM
Component Object Model
Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...

 objects, largely written in C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

. When development started in 1998, the available platform was Windows NT3.51 running IIS3. This suffered from a host of serious technical problems which had to be solved by either writing replacement code (e.g. the system uses its own session manager rather than the one provided by IIS) or by delegating operations to other platforms. A Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 based accelerator sits between the Windows cluster
Cluster (computing)
A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely thus in many respects forming a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks...

 and the Internet and this provides a range of other services which were unavailable or unusable on Windows NT3.51. All this ran on a large collection of commodity servers which grew rapidly as the userbase expanded and came to include specialist hardware such as a NetApp filer. Today, things have moved on and ZyWeb runs on a relatively small cluster of modern servers with current editions of Windows which do not suffer nearly as many problems. However an updated Linux accelerator remains in place and continues to provide important additional services, particularly email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

management.
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