Technical Specifications

As a project developed by humanists rather than computer scientists, and as a project intended to be replicated by other humanists, Shuhai Wenyuan was conceived from the start to be easy and inexpensive to develop, deploy, and maintain. As a result, we use only only the most efficient and cost-effective technology.

Our server is an Apple Macintosh: Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5, 2GB RAM, Mac OS 10.3.

We chose Apple as our main platform for the following reasons:

• The Unix based Apple Macintosh, from both the user and developer standpoints, is still the easiest to use and most reliable system software available.
• By developing on the Mac, we ensure that our system is usable on the Macintosh platform, a platform that though widely used in the humanities, is sometimes overlooked by PC-centric developers.
• By using Macintosh, we ensure that we can use all data available, for the reason that the Macintosh can nearly always use data from PCs, while the opposite is less often the case.

We use the Apache web server to handle the Shuhai Wenyuan website. Apache is a very powerful and well established web server, available to all Unix and Windows users without charge. It is rarely justified to use a competing product.

Shuhai Wenyuan software development was done by Tsunami Data Works LLC. Software development invovlved designing the data storage and indexing methods, programming the 4D database manager, and writing the supporting javascripts, parsers, and transcoders.

While Apache runs the basic web site, query processing and page building are handled by a database manager. Our database manager software is a powerful off-the-shelf product called 4th Dimension (4D). Employing this rather than developing our own software from scratch has the following benefits:

• Cost-effectiveness: 4D has very favorable pricing for academic use, and owing to its ease of use one can either build a database oneself or hire a contract developer rather than employing a full-time programer. In addition, 4D's existing database architecture, tools, and scripting functions significantly reduce the developer's load.
• Flexibility: 4D offers a full-featured Pascal-like language that allows flexible and efficient programming, and by offering structure and programming functions that are modifiable during and after development, 4D allows changes to be made at any step in the project's evolution. In addition, 4D is cross-platform (internet-, Java-, SQL-, Oracle-, Mac-, PC-compatible), and because it is a commercial product, it offers consistent and unproblematic updates as enhancements are made and as platforms and standards change. In fact, 4D excels at innovating and keeping up with industry changes, such as, in our case, handling Asian Languages.