How this Site Works

The Midland Rotary Auction has been an evolving fundraiser. With a 20 year history, the Auction has moved from radio to television and now to the Internet.

For those interested in how things work, this page describes the architecture and programming that goes on behind the scenes to make this site run smoothly.

When deciding on how to program the web site, we had to make sure that it could handle a large number of users potentially placing bids in the dying seconds before a block closes.

This meant that the site needed to be written using ASP (Active Server Pages - a dynamic HTML programming language) accessing a Microsoft SQL Server database (SQL Server is a powerful enterprise level database system that can support large amounts of information and concurrent users) using an application architecture that could handle the load.

Once we decided on the programming environment, we had to draft the structure of the web site. From meetings between the graphic artists, programmers and Auction personnel, pavliks.com came up with a draft site map and rough outline of each page's content.

Then it was the graphic artist's turn to create a pleasant looking interface that was also functional. A few mockups were presented to the Auction committee until the one you are looking at was approved.

Then it was time for the programmers to get involved once the functionality and look had been agreed upon.

The critical part, as mentioned before, was to make sure that the web site could scale and handle a large load. Every page you look at on this web site requires the web server to access the SQL Server database for up-to-the-second information.

This poses a problem when many people hit the site at the same time. In the world of web servers, one of the factors that determines the speed of a web site that is database driven (like this one), is how quickly it can create a connection to the database, find what data is needed, format the page and deliver it to you. It sounds like a lot, and it is.

The way we developed this web site so that it can accommodate a large number of users, was by using COM (component object model) components and MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server). Without getting too technical, COM components are essentially very tightly written pieces of code (.dll's) that allow programmers to separate the different logical parts of an application. The Midland Rotary Auction web site was architected as an n-Tier application which separates the Data Layer from the Business Logic, Workflow and Presentation Layers. Each layer is packaged/compiled into its own COM object allowing for reusability and efficiency.

This diagram outlines the order in which requests are made.

The End User enters www.Midlandrotaryauction.com in their web browser. The web Browser then gets routed to the correct Web Server at pavliks.com. The IIS (Internet Information Server) retrieves the page the End User requests. IIS then finds some ASP code in the page and ask the ASP engine to interpret it. The ASP code interacts with the COM objects that MTS controls. MTS then lets the COM object access the SQL Server database and retrieve the required data. That data is returned to the ASP engine where it is turned into HTML that IIS can then send back to the End User.