Kids4Truth is an exicting children's ministry that AWS has been involved with since the beginning. AWS has implemented a number of projects for Kids4Truth and we encourage you to view the various sections on this page to learn more.

General Web Site
The Kids 4 Truth web site represents the "crown jewel" of interaction and co-develpoment between AWS and The Art Mill. The stunning visual images are credited 100% to the skilled staff of The Art Mill. AWS has provided a significant amount of work developing the back end technologies to power the various applications and functions of this web site. This web site "went live" in the spring of 2000 and has averaged no less than 1,000,000 hits per month since inception including a visitorship from every continent and every major language group.

List Server
One of the goals of the Kids4Truth staff was to have a means of effectively communicating changes to the web site, as well as new products to their consumer base. AWS built an opt-in list server powered by Microsoft's SQL Server 2000, ASP.NET (C#) and Windows 2000 (IIS 5). This general list currently has over 38,000 subscribers and allows the staff of Kids4Truth to send personalized messages to each of those members. Recipients of the messages have the ability to self-manage their subscriptions (subscribe/un-subscribe). This system presented some unique challanges in that Kids4Truth did not want to immediately send out mails to lists with memeberships greater than 2000. The concern was that this would place too much stress on their servers and network infrastructure during key times of the day. AWS developed a Windows service that monitors a "queue" that holds messages written but not sent out. When the approved time window arrives, if there are any messages in the queue, they are sent.

Greeting Card System
Kids4Truth has devloped a number of stunning pieces of artwork as a result of their work in the Flash "Dynamations" and other projects on the web site. Utilizing some of the features of GDI+ (a component of the .NET Framework) AWS has designed and implemented a system by which visitors to the web site can select from a list of available images, type in their own message, and send that "card" to a friend. This system is built on C#, ASP.NET, and XML. XML is used for the cataloging system allowing the graphics design and Kids4Truth staff to add and remove cards from the system without requiring any changes to the code base.

Idea and Request System
A couple of the earlier projects that AWS performed for Kids4Truth involved systems by which visitors to the site could submit various things (in this case, ideas of things to do with your parents or prayer requests). These bits of visitor input would go into a queue so that the appropriate Kids4Truth staff memeber could review and approve the entry after which it would be visible to the general public on the web site. The system also supported the idea of 'private' input whereby a visitor could submit a prayer requests that would only be seen by the staff of Kids4Truth and would not be viewed publically. The system also supports an "auto expiring" feature whereby items are no longer displayed after a given time period. This helps keep the content fresh. The technologies used to implement these portions of the site are VBScript, ASP 3.0 (aka, "classic ASP"), SQL Server 2000, and Windows Server 2000 (IIS 5).

Send to a Friend
One of the key features of the Kids4Truth web site are the "Dynamations". These "Dynamations" are Flash-based presentations that illustrate a given Bible story. The "send to a friend" component allows those who have viewed a given Dynamation to send a link for that presentation to up to three friends at a time. This feature is implemented using VBScript, ASP 3.0, and Windows Server 2000.