GREAT Frontier Web Site for January 26, 1998: Hotel World 7,500 hotel pages built dynamically on demand.

David Small describes the project:
The site, hotel guide and booking service uses Frontier for:

Preprocessing all requests, counting, logging and tracking visitors within 30 min. Counting total page views (there are a lot of dynamic pages). Sending back some special dynamic pages (esp. the home pages) which are different every time you view them.

Search requests are received by Frontier and sent to one of two slave machines also running Frontier and FileMaker (this is a lot more efficient that running FileMaker on the web server). All the search pages (apart from the top one) are generated by Frontier. Some of the country search pages are static, the rest dynamic and built on the fly.

There are about 7,500 of hotel pages, built dynamically on demand by Frontier, using content from FileMaker. The static deluxe hotel brochures are built in Frontier but are sometimes edited on the fly by Frontier to give the pages a different look such as using a particular hotel group's colours.

The on-line booking system is also in Frontier and all the pages are dynamic. It communicates with a GDS Booking Server (hosted on UNIX) via custom TCP/IP messages.

The whole system runs on four 7500 PowerMacs and is up 24/7.