Ready for prime time

In large data- and access-intensive web sites, efficient and reliable access is hard to achieve. This situation gets even worse for web sites providing precise structured query facilities and requiring topicality of the presented information even in face of a highly dynamic content. The achievement of these partly conflicting goals is strongly influenced by the approach chosen for page generation, ranging from composing a web page upon a user's request to its generation in advance. The official Austrian web-based tourism information and booking system TIScover tries to reconcile these goals by employing a hybrid approach of page generation. In TIScover, web pages are not only generated on request in order to support precise structured queries on the content managed by a database system. Rather, the whole web site is also pre-generated out of the extremely dynamic content and synchronized with the database on the basis of metadata. Thus, topicality of information is guaranteed, while ensuring efficient and reliable access. This paper discusses the hybrid approach as realized in TIScover, focussing in particular on the concepts used for pre-generation.1