The development platform was an Apple iBook with Mac OS X version 10.3.x. The web server was the default Apache (version 1.3.29) installation. PHP (version 4.3.4) and MySQL (version 4.0.16) were installed using Marc Liyanage’s packages (from http://www.entropy.ch). In addition to standard UNIX command line tools, some graphical applications were used. The development work was done using the SubEthaEdit (version 1.1.5) text editor, which is integrated with the XHTML-rendering engine for convenient rendering experimenting. A screen capture is shown in Image 3.

Image 3 - A typical view to the SubEthaEdit editor

The database queries were built (and tested) using CocoaMySQL (version 0.5), a graphical interface for the MySQL database. A screen capture is shown in Image 4.

Image 4 - The interface of the CocoaMySQL application

In addition to the development platform, different setups were used to test the interfaces and functionality of the product. A PC-compatible desktop computer (700 MHz) with Microsoft Windows XP and Gentoo LiveCD (version 1.4) Linux distribution was the common testing setup. Both operating systems had multiple browsers from different vendors installed. The range of different combinations is shown in Table 3.

Table 3 - Operating system and browser configurations used in floater testing