The technology used for
Open Source Shakespeare

Eventually, this page will have a comprehensive overview of how OSS is constructed. Right now, it's a general description.

Texts: A variety of sources. The first four plays are from the Gutenberg Project, but the management has found that the Complete Moby Shakespeare has better-edited texts that are more conducive to parsing.

Parser: For the uninitiated, a parser is something that reads a document and does something with it. In this case, the parser reads the texts and feeds it into the database. The OSS parser is written in Perl.

Database: Originally it was Microsoft Access, but switched to mySQL because it's cheaper to find a Web host that supports mySQL. Plus, in the management's temperate, considered, intellectual opinion, Microsoft sucks and we hate them.

Web server: The OSS campus has a test server running Apache 1.3.29, but there's no reason it couldn't run on Apache 2.0, or IIS for that matter. It has not been tested on any other platform.

Page language: All of the pages are written in PHP, with the exception of a few HTML pages here and there. Again, this was done because most el cheapo hosting companies support PHP. It's also a mature scripting language that has a tremendous amount of free support on the Web, and we like that.