About Xephos Internet

Innovative Design

The xephos internet application server is developed by LOOKsystems Limited and represents the culmination of nearly eight man years development. It brings together many elements to deliver a truely ground-breaking design which can be easily integrated into any web site.

• cost effective deployment
• high performance search engine
• powerful object oriented database
• highly scalable architecture
• high availability support
• flexible customisation
• tight web integration
• robust implementation

High Peformance Search Engine

The xephos application server delivers a high performance multi-modal search engine capable of handling large volumes of data and calculating over 1000 journey combinations per second. In addition to the search engine, an external results cache is used to retrieve previously calculated results almost instantaneously. This means that popular queries are served much more quickly.

Powerful Object-Oriented Database

At the heart of the xephos application server is an extremely powerful, object database. Just a few attributes are given below:

Gazetteer

• hierarchical gazetteer
• unlimited levels e.g. place > area > cluster > stop
• unlimited number of groups, clusters, stops and platforms
• unlimited number of aliases for all locations
• unlimited number of places of interest
• unlimited number of information tags
• classification of locations into categories
• classification of locations into zones
• exact, inword, partial and sound-like searches
• nearby searches e.g. map references, street names, postcodes, etc
• high geodata precision (< 1m)
• unlimited name lengths

• unlimited walk links
• unlimited timetables
• unlimited interchanges/connections
• unlimited frequency tables
• unlimited mode types

• unlimited number of stops
• timing point and stop level information
• service, journey, stop and time level notes
• unlimited information tags
• patterns of service

• platform-to-platform times
• stop-to-stop times
• walk/connection time
• interchange penalty
• mode change penalty

Easily Adaptable

The xephos internet technology can be easily customised and integrated into any web site.

The navigation and content of the dynamic web pages generated by the xephos application server can be customised by site designers using a combination document style sheets and html templates. The html templates support a simple scripting language which is tightly integrated into the xephos database and provides a high level of control.

Bespoke extension modules can also be provided by our programmers for the ultimate in customisation and performance.

Click on the links below to see some alternative timetable styles along with sample style sheets and html templates:

• Journey Solutions Timetable
• Black & White Timetable
• French Timetable
• Blue Timetable

• Timetable Style Sheet
• Show Journeys Html Template
• Tidy Journeys Script

Affordable Scalability

The xephos internet technology is highly scalable and can be deployed in a wide range of configurations - from a single server to large multi-tier clusters.

A light-weight cgi script is used to relay requests from the web server to the appropriate xephos application server. Dynamic web content is generated by the xephos application server and returned to the web server. CPU intensive calculations, such as journey planning, are cached in an external database and can subsequently be retrieved extremely rapidly by all servers in the cluster.

The cluster-based design, not only uses cheap, off-the-shelf components (rather than large expensive servers) but also allows web sites to respond to increased traffic by simply adding additional hardware.

High Availability

Whilst the xephos application server is intrinsically robust (each request is run as a separate process), the use of clusters can help to ensure 100% availability. If a single server fails, the remaining cluster members can take the strain whilst the faulty workstation is rebooted or repaired.

More Information

This page only provides a brief introduction to the xephos internet application server. If you have specific queries or require more information, please feel free to contact us.