Being faced with a choice between 150 hostels in a country the size of Australia makes planning your travel itinerary a difficult and often overwhelming task. Even more overwhelming is attempting to provide an automated, online service that can assist in the process- but this is precisely what the Youth Hostel Association of Australia (YHAA) charged Internet design and development company, Red Square, with developing.

The business relationship between YHA Australia and Red Square began in late 1988, when the two came together to introduce an e-commerce element into the existing lifestyle-based YHA Australia Web site, with the intention that it generate revenue as a profit centre for the organisation.

According to Steve Baty, senior analyst for Red Square, the subsequent improvement in return on investment allowed both companies to investigate other methods for driving traffic to the site and creating clear pathways to the transactional centres within the site.

The existing site was problematic in the sheer bulk of information it needed to provide, and the limitations of the technology presenting that same information, according to Baty.

"One of the things that came out of the various exercises was the difficulty in presenting a complex mix of information, such as travelling around Australia (which is geographically quite large), seeing the things that are available in Australia (which is quite diverse as well), where they are available in Australia and how you would get from place to pace. The idea was born of doing an itinerary planner," explains Baty.

An itinerary planner is an element that YHA Australia director Rolf Dulks intended to feature on the site as early as 1998, but was unable to do so due to a lack of available, relevant technology.

"We wanted to build the itinerary planner in 1998 but then we just didn't have the technology at all...that only become available in the last two months and we could finally move ahead", says Dulks.

The advent of Macromedia Flash and Cold Fusion, versions 5, made the idea a reality. Baty explains that in order to present the information in a way which was both "visually appealing" and also "functionally strong and dynamic", Red Sqaure looked to Macromedia's Flash and ColdFusion products to deliver.

The combination of technologies enabled Red Square to develop a dynamic, one-screen system for the YHA Itinerary Planner, but even with this in place, there were challenges and limitations that needed to be addressed.

According to Baty, one of the "biggest limitations" was centred on the database and interface integration.

"Pulling dynamic content out of the database was quite difficult and a lot of the interface components that you see in the interface (in the Flash part of it) were quite consuming to actually code and maintain. There was a lot of custom written script, written from scratch by hand", says Baty.

To resolve these issues, Red Square explored the technologies available on the market and settled with the new Macromedia MX suite of products, including ColdFusion MX and Flash MX.

"We just couldn't see another solution that would fit into that environment [YHA Web site] that would maintain the cohesion across the rest of the web site, so it was pretty much a no-brainer. The additional functionality, and the integration with ColdFusion--we found that quite a powerful combination", says Baty, referring to the decision to deploy Macromedia's products over that of its competitors.

The migration from Flash 5 and ColdFusion 5 to the latest MX versions, resolved many of the outstanding issues, and allowed Red Square to deliver a cost-effective, dynamic and low-weight Web site.

"One of the things that we found migrating forward from Flash 5 to MX was being able to replace a lot of those interface bits with the in-built component in MX. Making those sorts of changes reduced the custom code that we had by over a thousand lines, which is about a third of the code for the application, so that no longer became a maintenance issue," explains Baty.

"Trying to get it [Macromedia Flash 5] to do what we wanted in terms of building a really rich application and a dynamic application was labour-intensive by comparison to the MX version, and therefore limited".

The cost-savings resulting from decreased labour and maintenance was just one of the benefits that YHA Australia has enjoyed as a result of the Macromedia MX deployment. According to Dulks, the benefits to the user are just as important.

"It's basically a cost benefit, but it's also a benefit in terms of download time. Previously we would have needed some megabytes, whereas now it's a hundred kilobytes, so it's so much less in download time. That's quite important to our customers because so many of them tend to utilise Internet cafes, so they really have limited lime and it's a big cost issue."

Much of the reason for this benefit lies in a new component of MX called Flash Remoting. Baty explains that the use of remoting allows for smaller, incremental calls for data, on demand, as opposed to traditional methods of loading complete data sets up front. By eliminating the need to load up front, and providing more of a streaming-style environment, long loading sequences become an issue of the past.

For the user, says Baty, this means a "sharper, snappier experience on the site".

Although the MX-developed Itinerary Planner has only been live on the site for two weeks, Red Square and YHA Australia are already seeing benefits such as:

• Provided a means for Red Square to save on development costs by publishing components as re-usable web services, so developers can provide future syndicated content for third parties, including reservation systems used by larger hostels, and various travel organisations
• Reduced the amount of ActionScript required for the enhanced Travel Itinerary by an estimated one third, from 3,000 lines of code, down to 2,000. Instead of creating custom ActionScript to parse and import the XML data generated by ColdFusion, Macromedia Flash MX uses Flash Remoting and remote components for streamlined connectivity between the database and the client
• Enhanced access to server behaviours allowed developers to create complex database queries using drag and drop technologies that made it quick and easy to build prototypes
• File size reduction from 224k to 109k reduces download time by 50 percent
• Improves the flow of data between client-side and server side technologies. Functionality like that provided through Flash Remoting makes it feasible to add new layers of functionality and build complexity into a site without building up exorbitant down time

Technical Summary

YHA Australia Web site runs Windows NT 4 Service Pack 6 on a P LPr running dual Pentium III 500MHz processors, 512Mb RAM and twin 18Gb SCSI hard drives. The Macromedia products used to develop the site include ColdFusion MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX

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