What is WebKeystone?

WebKeystone is a set of tools used to put business processes on the web and to build interactive web sites.

What are WebKeystone's key features?

• Demanding projects may be built and maintained with minimal effort.
• Increasingly complex applications scale well.
• Heavily loaded systems may be distributed across a network.
• The system offers multiple levels of security and resource control.
• The scripting language is extensible and can link to any other programming language.
• The system is extensible by adding drop-in-modules and importable components.
• Developers can be productive shortly after being introduced to the system.
• Persistency is achieved without using cookies.
• WebKeystone components may be distributed anywhere on a server or a network.
• Data, such as dates, may be validated and converted to a standard format.
• WebKeystone can be made to run on Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms.

What does WebKeystone do?

WebKeystone responds to email, to information entered into web browsers, and to requests from other WebKeystone and non-WebKeystone servers. It manipulates that information using built-in modules or your own WebKeystone scripts to build web pages on the fly, send email, update databases, and send requests to other servers.

What distinguishes WebKeystone?

• WebKeyscript, WebKeystone's scripting language, is not interspersed with HTML as it is with many other web application servers. Separating the code from the data makes WebKeyscript easy to read, write, understand, and maintain.
• WebKeystone is a highly portable system which in the future will be moved to Solaris and Windows platforms. WebKeystone was developed on Linux and BSD platforms.
• WebKeystone executes scripts rather than methods on objects as some application servers do. Thus developers may use familiar procedural constructs but object-oriented programming is available to more sophisticated users. Some application servers treat all HTTP requests as invocations on methods of objects. There are facilities in WebKeystone that allow this, but it is not required that all HTTP requests be treated this way.
• Resource consumption can be controlled, monitored, and billed.
• WebKeystone is security-conscious.
• WebKeystone runs on multiple servers. It may be configured with its components all together on a single server, with its components installed in different places on a single server, or across different servers. After installation, it is possible to move its components.

What are WebKeystone's building blocks?

How is WebKeystone being used?

• WebKeystone is used to collect information from forms and generate mail for the user and mail for the site owner.
  • Pacific Catalyst
  • Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce - Visitor Survey
  • MasterPark - Reservations
  • NW Event Rentals - Inquiry Form
  • Just Two Bikes Contact Form
  • Economic Development Council of Jefferson County Inquiry Form
  • Science Technology and Manufacturing Association
• WebKeystone is used as a pre-employment filter.
  • OlympusNet Employment
• WebKeystone is used to collect information, store the information in a database, and generate special information from the database.
  • PTguide - Restaurant Database
  • Sound Home Resource Web - Q&A Database
  • Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce - Member Directory
  • Olympic Peninsula Lodging Database
  • KPS - Provider Search
  • KPS Custom Directory -- Sections of this site are unavailable for public viewing due to either the proprietary nature of the software or the confidentiality of the material on the site. This was developed for the use of insurance agents who previously had to order print directories from the main KPS office every time they wanted to update their provider lists. This application allows agents to compile a list of providers by City, County or Specialty and generates the results as a tightly-formatted RTF file, which can then be printed right off the agents' hard drive.
  • Webkeystone Example: Accessing and Searching a Database
• WebKeystone is used to take visitor input and generate a new web page from it.
  • WebKeystone Example: Generating a Faxback Form on the Fly
• WebKeystone is used to allow access to a site by a select group of users and as a method of maintaining both the group and the group's access privileges.
• By an ISP as a method of accessing and maintaining customer accounts. Customer accounts are accessed and modified in this virtual company by support personnel from their home offices over the web. It uses email and the web for collecting and reporting customer data. (This site is on an Intranet and is not publicly accessible.)
• The same ISP uses WebKeystone to collect information on time sheets from employees, categorizing the information, and delivering the information to the payroll department.
• WebKeystone is used as a method of maintaining a single calendar of events that many people may change or view.
  • Olympic Peninsula Events Calendar
  • PTguide - Event database
• WebKeystone is used as a method of providing a shop over the web, and providing dynamically built pages of products. The shop collects not only the products purchased but maintains customer information, including credit cards. The shop links the credit cards to a processing center.
  • Earthwater Stencils
  • Jardin du Soleil Lavender
  • AP&T Phone Store
  • Port Townsend Film Festival
• WebKeystone is used for subscription and registration forms.
  • OlympusNet's Domain Name Registration Form
  • OlympusNet's Mailing Lists Subscription Form
  • AAMA Course Registration -- Sections of this site are unavailable for public viewing due to either the proprietary nature of the software or the confidentiality of the material on the site. The application allows members of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncturists to register for courses. This form verifies a user is a member, calculates the price of the course based on the date the form is filled out and what level of membership the user has, and issues a confirmation number by email.
• WebKeystone is used for message boards and guest books.
  • WebKeystone Example: Creating a Message Board
  • WebKeystone Example: Creating a Guest Book

What do developers say?

• "We have been using WebKeystone for the last 2-3 years. When we started writing applications we had a comprehensive HTML background, but no programming experience. We were able to learn WebKeystone very quickly and went from writing simple mailback forms to complex order forms to database applications within a few months.

  The best part of WebKeystone, from our developer perspective, is that almost every line of code we write can be recycled in other applications. This means that every successive application we develop, regardless of its complexity, takes less and less time.

  Everything we've written has run very reliably from its initial launch on. As WebKeystone has been modified and upgraded over the past several years we have seen minimal disruption in our existing applications, and have in fact seen performance enhancements. The management tools have continually been refined, often with suggestions we've offered. We've found the WebKeystone development team to be extremely responsive to our needs as web developers, adding functions and providing documentation when we've requested it. Overall support for the product has been excellent.

  We've been very impressed with what we've been able to do with WebKeystone, particularly given our non-programming background."

  --Carrie Muellner, Wind's Eye Design, Inc.

• "After looking around for a few weeks to find a comprehensive but also easy to learn and use Web development toolkit, I selected to use WebKeystone because of its ease of use and especially its capabilities to build anything I needed without any limitations.

  This choice has proven to be a good one. With a general programmers background and some understanding of the web world, it only took me an afternoon to understand how WebKeystone works and to be able to start developing my own webstore. Within 4-5 weeks I was able to go live with a quite extensive website which supports tailor-made search facilities, a shopping cart and check-out mechanisms. Especially the substitution mechanisms in WebKeystone have proven to be an excellent tool to build dynamic, completely computer generated HTML forms to present user-controlled information to my customers.

  As an extra "plus" I am very pleased with the excellent support from the WebKeystone development team. Any questions that would come up were usually answered within an hour.

  I have been live since June 1999 and have been able to add extra features to my website over time without any problems, but additionally have been very, very pleased with the reliability. In the last 2 years, I cannot remember having had more that at most 2 or 3 times that the server has been down and if that would happen it was fixed within an hour. So, reliability has proven to be excellent.

  I feel comfortable recommending WebKeystone to anybody who is looking for an easy development environment as well as a reliable and fast webserver."

  -- Rob VandeWeghe, www.StampsOnTheWeb.com

How easy is WebKeystone to learn?

• Very easy for simple applications. All that is needed in order to make it work at its most elementary level is a basic understanding of HTML. The WebKeystone Learning Center walks a developer through a series of lessons of increasing complexity, with working examples and explanations.
• Complex tasks involve scripting, which requires familiarity with programming concepts. WebKeystone's scripting language, called "WebKeyscript", is elegant, logical, and easy to learn. It includes an interactive, text-based tool for trying out WebKeyscript. WebKeyscript is written in clearly indented blocks and is not interspersed with HTML, which makes it easy to read.
• When WebKeystone detects a programming error, it displays a description of the error and links to the relevant parts of the WebKeystone Reference Manual, giving the programmer immediate feedback.

How is WebKeystone documented?

• Comprehensive tutorials, FAQs, and reference manuals are available online. The WebKeystone site is currently being rewritten in XML.
• Python books:
  • "Learning Python", O'Reilly, March, 1999, Lutz and Ascher.
  • "Sams Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours", May, 2000, Laningham.
  • "Core Python Programming", November, 2000, Chun.

How can I try WebKeystone out?

Apply for an Introductory Account which includes a one month trial use of WebKeystone.