Lecture 13 Business and the Internet SFDV Principles of Information Systems

2 Overview  A closer look at E-Business  Commercialisation of the Internet  Traditional web technologies  Client-side vs. server side technologies

3 A Closer Look at E-Business  “… is the use of the Internet and other networks and information technologies to support electronic commerce, enterprise communications and collaboration, and Web- enabled business processes…”  Origins back in the1960s:  EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer)  EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)  VAN (Value Added Networks)  But is it the same as E-Commerce? [Source: O’Brien, 2003]

4 E-Commerce Review  “The buying, selling or marketing of goods and services over the Internet”  Types:  Business to consumer (B2C)  Business to business (B2B)  Consumer to consumer (C2C)

5 What the advantages of e-Commerce? allows businesses to reach more customers – international distribute information quickly establish strong and lasting relationships What are concerns or threats to e- Commerce? Ensuring transactions are safe and consumers are protected (privacy) Legitimacy of their customers Rapid growth (hardware etc.)

6 Commercialisation of the Internet 1. Distribution of Berners-Lee’s Web browser and Web server software 2. Legalisation of commercial activity 3. Development of easy-to-use graphical Web browsers

7 Digital Content & Streaming Media  Movies over the Internet  Music distribution (iTunes Store)  Possible with Broadband

8 Using the Web Process: 1.Web server (HTTP) receives request from a client machine 2.Processes the request 3.Sends relevant file over the Internet 4.Connection ended between client and server. 5.Web browser parses (interprets) the HTML 6.Renders page according to what is specified. 7.That is HTML controls presentation of content and web browsers understand this.

9 Review: Mark-up Languages  Standard Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML):  ISO standard for embedding structural information in documents  Basis of HTML, XML, DHTML, …  Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML):  Tags to specify how content is presented  EXtensible Mark-up Language (XML):  Tags provide information about content itself  Tags are customisable

10 Server-Side Technologies  Provide database-driven dynamic content  Web server software:  Apache  Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services)  Enable Web server interaction with data sources:  Macromedia ColdFusion Server  ASP (Active Server Pages)  PHP  …

11 Web Services  Expose internal systems to external clients  Transmit data via XML documents  Open standards (eg. SOAP)  Interoperability  Ideal for B2B

12 Summary  E-Business encompasses those activities supported and facilitated by ICT, which includes Web-based processes  E-Commerce is constrained to selling and marketing products or services online  HTML governs how content is presented, while XML provides information about the content itself   Note : Beginning of Assignment 1 (10%)