Ion wrote:
> He's not online today, but I'm sure he'll send you a note tomorrow.

It was a fun weekend. I didn't touch a keyboard for over 48 hours.
Played with family, saw Harry Potter, baked some bread, and in
traditional Boulder style had beautiful sunny and warm (70F) weather
followed by a fresh blanket of snow today.

Tom wrote:
> I am interested in learning more about how to program a site like
> yours. Can you recommend any good programming books and tell me
> what languages your are programming in.

Now [rubbing his hands in glee] for the fun geek stuff!

You'll be happy to know that programming a site like bivio became a
lot easier in June 2001 when we released the bivio OLTP Platform (bOP)
as freeware (open source). bOP is a complete application framework.
You can download and use it under the same terms as Perl, the language
bOP is programmed in.

The first step to understand bOP is to read the article "Why bOP?"
which is available at:

    http://www.bivio.ws/hm/why-bOP

The article talks about creating web-delivered applications and why
you need to look back in the past to understand how to move program
for the future.

We don't have much external documentation write now, but I'll be
giving a lecture at CU Boulder on bOP on Dec 4. I'll put my slides up
on http://www.bivio.ws with annotations around that time. You can
also try out and download our demo application:

    http://petshop.bivio.net

I also recommend "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" by Phil
Greenspun:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558605347/bivioalllower

He created a company called ArsDigita, but since has split from
there. However, you can still find a bunch of articles at his
old company:

    http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/

I don't recommend the ArsDigita toolkit unless you have a relatively
simple problem, but they do introduce the problems of creating
database-backed websites.

You should also check out ZOIS Limited's site:

    http://www.zois.co.uk

There are good articles on OLTP and its relationship to web
applications.

Creating web-delivered applications is easy given the right framework.
We are very happy with bOP. It's evolved over the last two years to
be robust and programmer friendly.

The programmers who created bivio also rent out. $-) We helped the
FAA created a content management system using bOP. A number of
smaller companies have benefitted from our services as well.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Rob