This revolutionary business impact is achieved through a complex interaction of technologies and standards that together provide near universal connectivity for businesses and their customers, and a common technology framework within which, at last, hardware and software from almost all major vendors can interact seamlessly. This article aims to provide you with an introduction to the most important technologies and standards used today to develop eCommerce sites on the Internet, so that you will be in a position to understand much of the terminology used by the Internet technologists with whom you will work. It also provides an overview of approaches to getting your business connected to and managing security on the Internet – something that cannot be overlooked. It does not seek to be a complete Internet technology reference.
Before you select the architecture for your site, it is important to develop a basic understanding of the options available. This will help you balance the necessity of speed to market with the advantages (and cost) of robust, mission critical components when considering different architecture designs for your site.
As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for the ultimate success or failure of your business, and you must take ownership of the site architecture decision, whether it is your own team that is building these critical components, or you are contracting with an outside company. Do not forget that, when working at Internet speed, this is a decision you will only make once – so take care!
Since the inception of the Internet, three major generations of architecture have evolved for building Web sites. Each generation has built on the previous technologies to achieve new capabilities. This article provides an overview of each of these architecture generations, and how they have contributed to increased robustness and scalability in Internet applications. In parallel with the development of the Internet, many businesses have deployed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (such as SAP). When the power of these ERP systems is combined with that of the Internet, even greater value can be generated for businesses.
It is important to remember, when considering the simplicity of the first generation of Internet architecture, that the original intention for the Internet was to allow remotely located researchers to share information. In its earliest days the Internet was used mostly as a network to support email and discussion groups. In the early 1990s, however, a combination of two efforts led to the creation of the first generation Internet Architecture. In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee posted the language of the World Wide Web (WWW) in an Internet discussion group called alt.hypertext. And between 1991 and 1993, Marc Andreesen and a group of student programmers at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) worked to develop a graphical browser for the WWW called Mosaic.
The first generation Internet Architecture provides the ability to serve formatted words and pictures to remote locations over the Web. The two major components are the browser and the Web server. The conversation between the browser and the Web server is initiated when the user types in or clicks on a new Web address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Browsers send URLs to the Web server in the form of a request in HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that tells the Web server where to find a specific page in its directory structure. The page is written in a special language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which allows the author to specify certain formatting attributes, as well as links to other Web pages on the Internet. The Web server then replies to the browser’s request by returning the desired HTML page and any graphic files that are included with that page.
The first generation Internet architecture published static electronic documents with a simplistic approach, one that encouraged millions of developers to start publishing on the Web. While there are many complex business functions that are not realistic to implement with this simple architecture, it is the perfect design for your new company’s first steps on the Internet. It is never too early to launch a Web site and your company’s first site should be fast to build, fast to deploy, low cost, and disposable. All you need is a few HTML pages and a Web server to start advertising your mission on the Web, announcing to the world who you are, what you are doing, and why they need to know!
Late in 1995, the introduction of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs to the Internet changed it from a medium that could only publish static electronic documents to a medium that could support dynamic client/server applications. The CGI standard allows the browser to send URL requests that, instead of returning static pages, launch an application located on the Web server. It is this application that generates, on demand, the HTML that is returned to the browser, instead of simply reading a file. Upon receiving a CGI request, the Web server launches the application and returns its results to the browser. CGI opens up a broad range of new possibilities, as Web sites using it are able to:
Put simply, CGI enabled business on the Web, and fundamentally changed the nature of what could be done on the Internet. CGI applications can also be developed in any programming language although scripting languages like PERL are the most popular. As CGI applications are easy to write, seemingly overnight developers and entrepreneurs around the world began to incorporate these programs into thousands of Web sites, bringing the Internet to life.
Powerful as it is, CGI also has significant limitations for more complex applications. For example, because a CGI application is run from scratch every time the Web server needs it to generate a page, it has no memory of any previous runs. In other words, it is ‘stateless’. This is not a problem if a user can enter all required information in a single HTML page, but useful applications typically require a seamless flow from screen to screen, page to page – they require the ability to remember, at a minimum, who the user is.
This limitation was quickly circumvented through the use of ‘cookies’. A cookie is a small file created by the user’s browser on the user’s machine at the request of a CGI program. Introduced by Netscape, it ‘permits a server to tell a browser to store a block of information on the user’s hard disk, and to give it back on subsequent visits to the same server. No information in a cookie is sent to a server that wasn’t first put there by the same server.’ With cookies, Internet applications can remember information across browser sessions (that is, different page accesses). Typical uses of cookies include:
While cookies provided many application benefits, this browser mechanism also raised significant concerns. Many users were outraged by the amount of personal information being tracked on their own machines by unknown Web sites. In addition, cookies created could be searched by companies to discover how employees were using their computers. To deal with such privacy and security concerns, browser makers were forced to provide the option of disabling the cookie mechanism. We will see below in the discussion of third generation architecture how this issue is resolved by enabling application servers to store profile and session information on the server side.
As the number of users of CGI applications continued to rise, a further limitation of CGI began to be realised – poor performance caused by the overhead of having to run a separate program to serve each and every browser request. Finally, serious programmers, used to the benefits of modern object oriented tools, found that CGI’s simplistic protocol was slow and cumbersome to code.
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