Example Nettalk Sites

[bshields]

Hi All,

I've been meaning to do this for a while, below is a list of some of my sites built in Nettalk. As you'll see some are "stock" and some are a bit worked.

LJ Hooker Digital Asset Management System

http://dam.ljhooker.com
Login: demo
password: demo

Written in a few days, as their Getty DAM wouldn't work properly. Has a clarion desktop app that manages the backend. MSSQL.

Inhabit Website

http://inhabit.com.au

My website. There is the boring stock website (served by Nettalk), but what you can't see is all the webservice stuff written in nettalk for email campaign tracking.

Real Estate Customer Websites

Below is a sample of some of our websites that use Clarion/Nettalk to serve and maintain them.

http://www.rtforsyth.com.au
http://www.prdwagga.com.au
http://www.prdshailerpark.com.au
http://www.boydell.com.au
http://www.prdnq.com.au
http://web.agencyone.net.au/MainPage?o=68
http://www.prdlanecove.com.au

You can also view the backend admin section of http://www.prdlanecove.com.au by clicking on the Login link top right of homepage and use

Login: admin
Password: demo123

Also has Clarion app used by us to manage websites, the one system hosts about 30 customers real estate websites. PostgresSQL

Realworks Form System

http://www.litehouse.com.au/

Login: demo
Password: demo

This is a generic PDF form online system. You create PDF forms, add additional commands to the PDF fields and the desktop app processes the PDF in a way that a generic Nettalk server can read the extended PDF and generate a form for entry and updating. Data is stored within XML (since the PDFs actually dictate the data that is stored).

There is also a PDF Merge server for generating the final PDFs (not to be confused with the Master PDFs used to create the forms).

These systems are in production so please be respectful and don't do anything inappropriate.

I have some other bigger systems, that have a heap more complex systems, but they aren't yet in production. I'll post those as I get them settled in.

Regards
Bill Shields

[Bruce]

Hi Bill,

thanks for the posting - looks like you've been a tad busy <g>

Cheers
Bruce

[bshields]

Hi Bruce,

Yeah we did most of this stuff about a year ago.

I thought people might be curious how we built "standard" looking stuff whilst using Nettalk and Clarion as a very effective replacement for ASP / PHP or .NET.

Also, all the real estate websites are built off a single nettalk server that supports a "toolbox" or "superset" of common real estate functions. So as we built each new one, it can be as little as 10 minutes work if they use a predefined template or about a days work if its custom.

What I really like is we have one set of source code for the webserver engine and templates that contain the HTML/CSS/JS stuff for the visuals. So we've finally separated the bulk of the programming logic from the visuals of the site.

Most of our competitors just copy and paste the web script from one site to another and then modify it. Which means after a few years you have a mass of source code that is all over the shop and maintenance is a huge problem. Using Nettalk as our webserver allows us to retro fit new functionality into all our websites at once.


Regards
Bill

[Jim A]

Very nice, Bill.  I'm impressed!

Do you run this off your own box -- or do you have a virtual server somewhere?  Just curious.

This makes me want to dig into Nettalk again.  I stalled out when I was having problems getting the format to look right.  You should maybe consider selling the css in the form of a template -- aka the templates available for codecharge, dotnetnuke, etc. 

Thanks for sharing.

Jim

[ccordes]

Wow!, Bill, nice work.
Very clean design. How much of this is template generated and how much is static html/css?

It seems like you've done a bunch of hand-coding or really worked over the generated code.
... OR is this more CSS than anything else?

Thanks for posting that. It raises the bar a bit and shows what we can do.
Chris

[bshields]

Hi Jim,

We have our own hosting environment internally. With about 40 servers in two racks. Frankly we could do all our stuff with about 8 servers, but i like toys.

Regards
Bill

[bshields]

Hi Chris,

The admin section of our websites are all stock nettalk with our added CSS, to get things like the XP menu to resize correctly and to get dropdown boxes to size consistency across browsers. Nothing real exciting there. I spent a fair amount of time get getting a reasonably nice look to the stock Nettalk, but its still looks very "business like" and not that pretty. http://litehouse.com.au is probably the best example of this. Its a pretty straight forward nettalk app except for its ability to render a nettalk style form from a dynamic definition and save and load the data from XML.

Most of the other sites are a mix of technologies. Firstly Nettalk is the server always. Nettalk is really good at the more complicated database stuff. Nothing is faster at building medium to complex forms and data entry. So it is really well suited to the "Admin" side of websites.

To get the general public side of our websites looking nice, we build on top of nettalk a simple merging engine. That way we take HTML and merge data into it. Not dissimilar to PHP or ASP. With the massive benefit of Clarion being our server language.

I feel now we have a good blend of technologies and can use the appropriate tools for the job. But it does require reasonable skills in HTML/CSS and Javascript.

Regards
Bill

[ccordes]

Bill,

I have to say nicely done. I was thinking of using static design pages and use <!--s:  tokens --> to place the lists and forms.
So far the stuff I've done hasn't required any real pizzaz but I did add to the template to allow using sucker fish menus. I think they look nicer.

Chris

[Alberto]

Nice job!

In http://www.litehouse.com.au/ , in the staff form you use a word like control to the profile field.
How do you do it?

Thanks

[bshields]

Hi Michelis,

I'm not 100% sure what you mean.

The only thing slightly odd on the form is the "Display" field for the word "security".

If you mean that, its a display field with the value 'Security' in the "Text" option.

Regards
Bill

[Alberto]

Sory, may be I was not so clear...

In the staff form,
you use a "word processor like" control or, lets say, a "RTF control" to edit the "profile" field.

How to use it in my forms?

Thanks
Alberto

[bshields]

Hi Alberto,

Thats the TinyMCE control thats part of NetTalk (mostly!).

I have a Text field, i have ticked the "Allow XHTML".

I know i had problems with this control, it appears to have a 16K limit (internal NetTalk restriction I think), dispite me telling it otherwise.

Also, in your main procedure, in extensions for NetTalk, find "Include HTML Editor" and tick it. This will includes the javascript libraries required.

TinyMCE has lots of options that NetTalk currently doesn't support. There is a place where you can hack this around within NetTalk (i have a little).

Regards
Bill

[Alberto]

Thanks, I understand but...
What do you mean as mein procedure?
I cant find any "Include HTML editor"
Any example?
Thanks
Alberto

[Rob Mikkelsen]

Great work, Bill!

Most of the stuff that I do is behind the US Government's firewalls, but I am currently working on a project for another client.  I hope to post the link in a couple months once we go online.

It is great to see what can be done with NetTalk - as far as I am concerned, I am now limited only by my imagination (which, depending on the day, can be very limiting, indeed!).

Rob Mikkelsen

[Mike Grigsby]

Bill, that's really nice work. FWIW, here are some of my outward facing projects:

http://correctionalmail.2jam.com/
http://hrsnap.com
http://carcrank.com
http://myhomeassets.com (both web and Windows apps)