A Client/Server Approach to Problem Tracking
Linking Remote Pages to a Central Database
By Paul L. Sica
Supporting products, managing bugs, and keeping track of customer queries are unexciting but necessary aspects of software development. Typically, these tasks involve expensive and proprietary applications, standalone databases, and data fields with fixed sizes and meanings. These applications' specialized nature contributes to high costs, limited customization, and lack of visibility into the status of the operation.
To address these problems, I've developed a tracking system for reported bugs and support questions that utilizes the Web in a unique way. This client/server application keeps the Web site—the view of the application seen by users—physically separate from the database. Yet it also gives engineers, managers, and customers access to the information they need.
This architecture allows a single system to support multiple groups within a company, or even multiple companies, from a single site. My database is available to my customers, regardless of whether or not they are physically hosted at my site. My customers can use a stock Web page from my site's library, or design their own, and still work with the same support system.
Support-System Operation
In my support system, a company prepares and posts custom Web pages that reside either on its local server or remotely, on another site. These pages then link to CGI scripts that reply to the requests to store or retrieve information.
