Once ispi was brought into the project, it became apparent that a static site was not adequate to house such a large online store. We were afraid that a static site would force customers to view page after page of products they weren't interested in to get to the product they wanted. At the technology integration, ispi selected Thunderstone's Texis and Web Script technology. The computer world is filled with database technology, some more advanced than others. What ispi sought was a powerful database system that could handle multiple types of data, and perform powerful text searching and manipulation.
Many database systems used on the Internet are slow.
These databases commonly use a CGI interface to access the database. CGI is not slow, but very often, CGI interfaces are set up to interact with a script written in Perl. To make matters worse, Perl is an interpreted language, which is poor technology when it comes to serving multiple users simultaneously. This is due to the way Perl goes about looking for the requested file. It does a folder by folder, file by file search, which comes down to slow file retrieval.