What about WAIS?

WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) predates the Web craze; since 1991, people have used its Z39.50 protocol to search a variety of databases on the Internet. Could WAIS clients bypass BYTE's Web server and search the collection directly? I found a pair of them (WinWais at ftp://ftp.einet.com and WaisMan3 at ftp://ftp.cnidr.org), started the WAIS service on my NT server, and pointed the clients at it. They worked. But so what? Hardly anybody uses WAIS clients because most WAIS databases have gateways that export Web-style access.

Still, a client/server protocol for searching remote databases ought to be useful. John Duhring, a WAIS Inc. vice president, showed me that it is. With WAIS tools, he says, Web providers can uniformly present information drawn from remote Web sites.

Consider The McGraw-Hill Companies, BYTE's parent. Many of its companies are building Web sites. With conventional Web technology, the corporate Web site can refer visitors to divisional sites -- but they might never come back. If, on the other hand, BYTE and others run both Web and WAIS servers, and corporate runs both a Web server and a WAIS gateway (see the figure "Web/WAIS Interaction"), the divisions can appear as players in corporate's virtual theater. Meanwhile, divisional Web sites accessed directly can retain their own flavor.

Web/WAIS Interaction

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With a WAIS gateway, a central Web site can consolidate many remote sites into a single presentation.