A system for permitting a first party to initiate a call from a second party to the first party, comprising a network for providing communication between the first party and the second party; web server connected to the network for storing at least one web page associated with the first party containing a first embedded computer program for creating a voice communication path terminating at a location defined by a predetermined Call Value; a first computer connected to the network for sending at least one message from the first party to the second party requesting the call, wherein the at least one message contains a second embedded computer program for allowing the second party to access the at least one web page; mail server connected to the network for storing the at least one message; a second computer connected to the network for retrieving the at least one message from the mail server and in response accessing the at least one web page by execution of the second embedded computer program and executing the first embedded computer program for initiating the call over the voice communication path from the second party to the first party at the location defined by the predetermined Call Value.

Methods and systems for designing a Web page, to be hosted on a Web page server. The development applications provide an object-oriented, template-driven interface for a customer or merchant to utilize in the design of a Web page or a complete Web site. The Web site produced allows the merchant to become a part of a distributed electronic commerce system or Internet commerce system for doing business on the World Wide Web. The design tool can be implemented in a Java application or applet.

A system for implementing a distributed electronic publishing environment with dynamic content. With this approach, the design of the page and content of the page remain separate, and yet automatic page generation may make use of caching techniques which are appropriate for the specific level of expected page content dynamics. The purpose of the page thus drives its caching implementation. If the page is relatively static, then the entire page itself is delivered from a static cache. If, however, only certain components of the page are expected to be dynamic, then only the portions of the page which can be rendered in advance are cached. The dynamic portions of the page are represented as executable versions of elements that specify instructions for how the page is to be rendered. Furthermore, result sets are cached when the dynamic portion of the page depends upon the contents of an external database. The architecture may also be implemented in an application server environment which supports execution on a server cluster.

The invention is a data structure published to an access viewer network such as the Internet or a wide area network. The deployment and publication of the data structure results in topic pages containing content items displayed for the access user. Means accomplish subscription and changes to the published data structure with minimal re-publication or re-deployment changes, thereby minimizing uploading time.

Apparatus, and accompanying methods for use therein, for an ISDN LAN modem that is suited for small user environments and which contains an internal ISDN router having a self-contained network hub for inter-connecting multiple network devices, such as workstations, to each other through a local area network and for permitting each of those devices to each gain access through the router to any one of a number of different remote networks. The LAN modem includes an internal web server for autonomously constructing and downloading a web page, through dynamic selective insertion of predefined event-specific web page components into a web page template, to the workstation. The resulting page informs a user stationed at the workstation of a failure condition or other operational event that then occurred at the LAN modem. The specific page components inserted into the template are selected based on the particular failure condition or other operational event which occurred.