I'm sure we'll find alot more uses for it in the future. The advantage of that kind of configuration is that we just need to install a Web Browser on the user's side. These tools are avaible from both Intranet or secured Internet connection. This can't be accepted by an end-user. ArtToday has a collection of over 600,000 keyworded images of all types.
Customers find images using keyword and category searches.
They serve about 250,000 raw hits daily. Information about the collection persists in an Oracle 7 database, and keyword searches happen via a custom application written using a Verity search engine. All of this is glued together using Perl. Although I don't have hard numbers, I would estimate a factor of 2-5 times CGI performance. These scripts query an mSQL database via various criteria, and employ the CPAN multiplexer code to choose a nearby mirror of the archive, if available and desired.