E-Blox Wine Demo

(Dec 1999 - Jan 2000)

The Project:
Create a demo using wine as the sample item to show how a back-end application can be built from a DTD, and how the information from one database can be shared with another database (East and West coast distribution centers, in this example). The demo had to use XML, and consequently XSL to transform the XML into HTML displayable by a web browser and to display the simplicity with which the XML data can be rebranded with a new look and feel. Click the image to the right to get a larger view of the home page.

What I did:

• Designed three simple but different looks to represent different wineries in the demo
• Gathered clip-art of grapes, wine, etc
• Used Photoshop to color clip art and create the three page layouts
• Created optimized web images (gif/jpg) from the Photoshop mockups
• Created HTML templates for each of the three layouts
• Wrote XSL for XML transformations for each non-static page in the demo (IE 5 compliant XSL)
• Created a status page that used an open connection to the server and JavaScript to update images to indicate which steps had been completed