Product Overview

What do you get when you add electronic commerce capability to one of the best business computing platforms around? It's a simple equation, really: e + Comet = eComet Let us explain. For many years, Comet has been recognized as a top-performing system for business and commercial applications. The words are repeated again and again. Solid. Reliable. Fast. Flexible. Efficient. Dependable. All you have to do is look at the list of application packages that have been developed for Comet, and you'll see why some of the top software developers continue to choose Comet. In the early days, Comet was the system of choice for minicomputer users who wanted to "downsize" to a more affordable (and faster) system. Comet evolved into a true client-server system with the development of the Comet File Systems for Novell and Windows NT Networks. Remote access over the Internet was first accomplished with CometAnywhere, Signature's first Internet product. Now, Signature Systems adds a new dimension with eComet. Comet is now a host system for Internet applications. The users are running web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The web pages send data to a Comet system, and the Comet system sends web pages back to the browser. The result is a remarkable platform for business-to-business e-commerce. It's an even more remarkable platform when an eComet system is integrated into a Comet network. In this case, the data files are stored on a fast file server using Comet File Server software for Novell or Windows NT, and the eComet applications run on a node within that network. Here's another sometimes-overlooked aspect of Comet. All Comet application programs are written in Signature's Internet Basic compiler language. This language offers some of the most powerful programming tools around, plus it's an easy language to use. It should come as no surprise that all eComet application programs are written in Internet Basic, too. In fact, current Comet developers are able to write eComet applications without learning any new instructions -- the existing language does the job. (To make things faster in a couple of areas, we added a few new options to the current language, and these options are explained in sample programs in a tutorial for eComet.) The real work is being done be some behind-the-scenes code in Comet. This code turns Internet Basic into an eXtended Application Pages (XAP) language. XAP is an advanced server-side technology in which you can combine HTML pages, compiled scripts, and high-speed access to live data to create powerful web-based applications. This patent-pending technology was invented by Signature Systems, Inc. Take a look at some of the demo applications we wrote with eComet. We think you'll be impressed. For a complete tour, see the eComet tutorial. This step-by-step guide will show you all of the aspects of designing and writing web applications, including some basic HTML information for beginning web page authors. Welcome to eComet. We look forward to seeing your web applications in the days ahead.