The site was a ground up project. I was involved in the initial gathering of specifications and bidding for the project in February of 1998. The database was designed by another member of the staff and reviewed by the group. My involvement on the project would occur once the perl programming was complete to create/edit users and auctions. This was due to the fact that my primary focus at the time was on the development of praxair.com. My contribution to the project would be in the research and development java servlet technology. We would use this technology to implement auction searching, category summaries, and auction hall listings and to generate the home page for the initial release of the site.

With the initial launch of the site complete in August of 1998, we continued bug fixes and upgrades to the site as requested by the owners. One of the first new additions that I was responsible for was the development of “Store Fronts”. This allowed web users to purchase eHammer products via a web interface. Once a purchase made, email is transmitted to the administrative personal at eHammer. From a hyperlink in the email the administrator is able to access the purchase, reprint the receipt and update the invoice with the UPS tracking number.

The next major functional rewrite was the viewing and bidding of individual auctions. This functionality was initial done in Perl and was requested to be rewritten in java servlets to reduce processing time. Once completed we noticed a 10% decrease in upload time for the viewing of auctions and a 50% decrease in processing time for placing bids on a auction.

Bulk uploads was the next enhancement to the site. The main functionality was written in java and sits on top of “procmail”. What happens is a registered seller emails multipliable auction information to the site. Procmail intercepts the mail and calls the java program. This program then verifies the users privilages, edit checks the auctions information and computes the cost of each auction. Once the auction and billing information is committed to the Oracle database, email is generated to the seller with the completed auction(s) cost and a hyperlink to the auction(s) or a list of error(s) for each of the attempted posts is reported to the end user.