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:


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:





Updated 12/07/06