Adobe Success Story

· Because ColdFusion is easy to learn and use, the company can push new services and features faster than ever while employing junior developers.
· Featuring pre-built WML templates, ColdFusion enables developers to easily and quickly build and deploy wireless applications.
· 192.com already boasts more than 500,000 registered users—with 25,000 more joining every week.
· Service generates more than five million page impressions each month.

Project Details

For U.K. residents, dialing 192 for directory assistance is as common as 411 for U.S. citizens. Capitalizing on the ability of the Web to present more information—such as street maps, aerial photographs, driving directions—and the ability to push that information to advanced mobile phones, i-CD Publishing Ltd. used ColdFusion to create 192.com, the UK's largest directory enquiry service and voted one of the world's top three people-finding sites.

Voted a Top 50 site by About.com, 192.com already boasts more than 500,000 registered users—with 25,000 more joining every week—and generates more than five million page impressions each month.

"We have the entire electoral roll for the U.K.," said Dominic Blackburn, IT director for i-CD. "That means we have all voting-age adults listed for a particular address or phone number—not just the head of the household. And our rates are far cheaper. Free registration gives you 20 free searches a month and each additional search is only 5p - far cheaper than you would pay British Telecom. Most of our members average about eight searches a month, so we're free for most members."

Three years earlier, i-CD was an acclaimed CD-ROM publisher that had blossomed into a 60-person firm with a market capitalization of £350 million, largely on the success of its acclaimed "UK-InfoDisk"—a perennial top seller in the UK. Until recently, its Web site was merely an e-commerce storefront for selling its CD titles. That changed as the Web phenomenon took hold in the U.K.

"To be honest, Web penetration in the U.K. was fairly slow," said Blackburn, "and we felt that the smarter strategy was to focus on CD-based revenue than to move too early to the Web. But about a year ago, we could see that we were further down the adoption curve and that there was a profitable business in putting this information on the Web."

Initially partnering with a third-party developer before bringing the project in-house, Blackburn and the i-CD team needed to standardize on a development platform. "Our partner had selected Macromedia ColdFusion but we wanted to make that decision for ourselves," Blackburn said. "After we looked at it carefully, we agreed that ColdFusion was the right choice."

With products that are consistently rated by customers and analysts among the most productive, versatile, and accessible in the industry, Macromedia enables both high-profile and up-and-coming companies to create innovative Internet business solutions. Macromedia's family of application servers and visual authoring tools, combined with its application framework, form a complete software infrastructure for building online businesses.

192.com's implementation featured ColdFusion, Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment.

Speed, Scalability, Reliability - 20 Trillion Records Daily

According to Blackburn, ColdFusion provides a range of capabilities that are essential to 192.com's business. "First and foremost, ColdFusion is absolutely amazing for rapidly developing applications," he said. "It's very easy to learn and we were able to create our site in just two man months. That's an incredibly fast development cycle for a site this rich. I can't see any other development languages competing with that. We have to stay ahead of the curve and with ColdFusion, we can launch a new service in only a week.

"Just as important, however, is that ColdFusion can scale up as we grow. We've grown from ground zero to more than five million impressions on our Fujitsu-Siemens servers running Windows NT. We process more than 250,000 searches each day that run across a 65 million-row database. That means our service is searching 20 trillion records every day.

"And, even with all of that traffic and that huge processing volume, ColdFusion hasn't fallen over in the more than eight months since we started using it in production. And, since we use Macromedia ClusterCats for load balancing among four servers, if one fails, we automatically restart for uninterrupted service."

Because ColdFusion is easy to learn and use, the company can push new services and features faster than ever employing junior developers. "There's a major shortage of developers in the U.K.," he noted. "We have five skilled ColdFusion developers and we have junior developers who have no prior experience with any development language. In a few weeks, they know enough that they can work with the live site. Not only does that help us get new services and features out quickly, it also enables us to recruit and retain Web developers, which is a strategic advantage for us," said Blackburn.

The Ideal "Killer WAP App"

Given the nature of its information and services—such as phone numbers and addresses—192.com is ideally suited for deployment to WAP mobile phones.

ColdFusion enables developers to easily and quickly build and deploy wireless applications using the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard and i-mode. For example, ColdFusion Studio includes Wireless Markup Language (WML) templates and help documents. Macromedia application servers require only a single line of code to specify content as WML.

According to Blackburn, the WAP development cycle was very easy. "We developed our WAP-accessible application in one week," he said. "It's incredibly simple to WAP-enable an existing ColdFusion site. We were very aggressive in ensuring we were available on the WAP phone platform when it launched in the U.K. When you think about it, directory enquiries are the perfect match for the WAP platform. We were intent on making our site the ideal 'killer WAP app.'"

Today, users of One2One mobile cell phones and users of the AOL/Carphone Warehouse Portal MVIVA can perform "who, what, where" searches from their phones and, soon, send and receive e-mail messages hosted by 192.com. Already, the site processes more than 25,000 WAP sessions each month, a number that Blackburn expects to climb substantially once next-generation phones are available next year.

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