Contract programming from external sources: Dick Hardt has drawn upon previous work experience in program development for the Windows environment, securing contracts for software development from other segments of the computing industry. Most recently Hip successfully bid for a contract with Microsoft Corporation to port Perl 5 to the Windows/NT platform. In such cases, Hip usually takes on sub-contract programmers to assist with the work.
Provision of Internet connectivity to other tenants of the 1122 Mainland building: Hip has an ISDN speed link to the Internet, arranged through ProNet, a local carrier, which in turn resells bandwidth from Sprint, a national carrier. The Yaletown address houses a number of small startup firms who use Hip's services to gain access to the global Internet. These firms include:
Providing a Web presence for other non-resident businesses: In these cases Hip coordinates the registration of a domain name for the client and provides the Web server space for the display of that client's pages. In general, no custom work would be required for clients in this category, and the client would do the necessary HTML formatting of their pages. The Vancouver Echo (URL: http://www.vannet.com/vanecho/) is an example of such a client.
Building customized Web sites for clients: certain clients require a high degree of custom programming for their Web site, to provide an interface between the World Wide Web and a client database. Hip has done work for two such clients: Supplyline (a dealer in used heavy equipment for industry) and Real Estate Weekly (publishers of a weekly paper of listings for the real estate industry).
For these clients, Hip staff have devised special scripts and procedures that take digital data from another, off-line source (a corporate database, or some form of product catalog) and process it to convert it to a form suitable for display (and searching) on the World Wide Web.
The Real Estate Weekly Web site (Figure 1) is the most elaborate example of Hip's work in this area. This site makes extensive use of custom-designed Perl scripts, which take the data used to prepare the weekly Real Estate Weekly "Home Guide" publications and restructure it into a form suitable for online searching and display. These scripts allow Hip essentially to automate what would otherwise be a very labour intensive process. For this kind of custom Web site design Hip charges a fee based on the amount of custom programming required, and the required frequency of updating the data.
At the present time this category of client is Hip's main source of revenue, and it continues to try and attract additional clients from the local business community. This is a highly competitive field at the moment, and not all of Hip's bids have succeeded; during my internship, an unsuccessful bid was made to create a Web site for the Vancouver Grizzlies N.B.A. franchise.