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What are the technological advantages of Cofax?

"If you persuade, speak of interest, not reason." -- Benjamin Franklin

For the tech community, here is why Cofax is nice from a technological viewpoint.

Configurable URLs -?Great for search engines and bookmarking!

Cofax was designed so that it can be implemented at any existing Web site without changing any existing URLs, thus preventing confusion and lost traffic. Once a reliable feed is established from the content source, using Cofax is easy. And because the documents appear to be flat HTML pages (even though they are not), Cofax will work seamless with existing Web traffic usage software. The configurable URLs feature allows a Cofax driven site to look just like a static html web site with folders and files to the outside.

Modular Design

Cofax was designed keeping best of breed philosophy in mind. It is a framwork which, at every level, components can be added, modified, and replaced with little effort.

Development was done using open industry standards, which are widely known and used. The system is not based on properitary technologies or dependent upon the original developers.

For example, Cofax, as implemented in Philadelphia, utilizes a SQL Data Store class that allows you to use any suitable database with a JDBC driver. But that is not where it ends. The SQL Data Store class itself can be replaced with an XML Data Store, ODI Data Store, or file system based Data Store. Alternate classes specified in the configuration and dynamically loaded.

Scalable System

Adding system resources can enhance Cofax's performance. More storage will allow content to be archived longer. Faster or multiple machines?with more processors and memory serve content faster. It can be run one PC for a small site or distributed across?a few dozen dedicated servers for a large high traffic site.

Portable

Can be easily installed at any hosting provider. Cofax can be?used on any server that supports Java. The preferred way to use the Cofax modules is via a Java Servlet, but they can be called as?ASP/COM compopents from Active Server Pages.

When using an SQL database as the data store, a JDBC driver is required for the database which are available from various vendors for almost every database now.

For KnightRidder.com sites hosted at InfiNet, Cofax can be easily?installed at InfiNet.

Saves System Resources

Cofax saves system resources by storing articles in only one location. In previous static systems articles would have to be copied into multiple locations in order to be part of more than one section or special package.

A sections/mapping entry describes which section/channel page the article will show up in (the mapping code), and where on that page the article will show (the position/ranking code), and from when to when the article will show up there (the start and end dates). Using this scheme, Cofax is able to make an article appear on different pages at different places at different times! That's great flexibility.

Speed of Delivery

The?module to cache frequently requested pages in memory or disk the delivery of dynamic articles?is as fast as that of static html pages.

Security

Editor's tools in use at Philly.com integrate with the network security.

Cofax was developed with Java

Cofax's modular design is such that it could be written in many object oriented languages such as Python. Click here to read why we chose Java.