Web Interface

San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, needed to provide a unified interface which would allow county residents to access certain public information when they visited county offices.

Before this web interface was created, four separate and distinctly different interfaces had to be used to access information on vital statistics, voter information, property assessments and county recorder data. In addition, each type of data resided in different databases on unrelated servers.

San Mateo County asked us to develop a portion of their web site which accessed voter information and property assessments. We developed an appropriate graphical "look", and implemented our part of the application in a way which easily integrated with other portions of the project implemented by San Mateo personnel.

Website Signup Component

The Signup Component provides a straightforward interface that allows users to sign up for a free web page. The interface is implemented as a Microsoft-Style Wizard, which guides the user step by step through the sign up process. The communication between the Signup Component and the web server is handled by a separate component called QCPipe. Eagle modified this component to allow communication through a proxy server. This makes the sign up process possible for those users who are behind a firewall. Website Signup Agent

Website Signup Agent

The Signup Agent is an extremely small, lightweight application that is designed to use very little in the way of system resources. The Agent runs invisibly in the background until an active Internet connection becomes available, at which time it launches a second small application. This second application checks for the availability of a web-based service. If the service is up and running, the user is notified and given the opportunity to connect to the server or to find out more information. Eagle provided a fully documented design and developed a functioning prototype to demonstrate the technical viability of the project.