And as these requirements change, Silverfish lets one make both small and large-scale changes with a minimum of effort. Payment processing With a Silverfish site, the processing of credit-card payments can take place seamlessly via ECNet, Cybercash or Worldpay. Sites created with Silverfish need to be hosted on a server that supports CGI scripting and database access. Right now, Southeaster offer hosting space on their own servers, but they are in talks with hosts to widen the options for developers and their clients. As for server operating systems, Silverfish can currently run on Windows 98, NT or 2000 platforms, with Linux and FreeBSD to follow soon.
Designers can thus focus on what they're good at, largely leaving the back-end stuff to Silverfish.
Southeaster hope that designers will take advantage of Silverfish to service clients at the Small to Medium Enterprise end of the market. The fact that Silverfish itself is free and that payment is only required once a site goes live is expected to encourage widespread adoption of the software. A fee of half the initial cost becomes payable annually.