HooperHorsfield.NET

HooperHorsfield.net [image right] was built to coordinate my wedding in October 2001 to Catrina Horsfield, herself a graphic artist. From the site, you could:

• Participate as an invitee, a family member, or a member with full posting rights
• Post/Delete News
• Respond to your invitation
• Query/Print guest information.

The site is built around JSP pages, running under Tomcat 3.2 and MySQL 3. Java Beans kept all the session information and form data. The server was a windows 2k box. Backup was performed using script code that dumped the database data and deployed web pages to another networked machine and to a local copy also. Backups were manually copied to a CD at various intervals.

This turned out to be a godsend since we had a hard-disk crash during the honeymoon. Once I came back I was able to reinstall the entire operating system and box from scratch and also restore the database from the other machine. The upshot? The machine was up within hours of us arriving back in the USA.

Oh we also used the Apache web server, and during the time it was up, the red alert worm came along. We were able to use apache to route requests for the worm to a simple counter that we displayed on the hooperhorsfield website in the bottom left hand corner.

All in all it was a considerable additional workload in addition to the wedding! But it was an excellent way to coordinate wedding information with my United Kingdom and Canada and Austrailian relations, and my new United States based family.