Electronic Commerce

Last Week• Internet utility programs

– Finger, Ping, Tracert

• Web Client-Server Architecture– Two-tier and three-tier architecture

• Communication protocols in client-server architecture– HTTP protocol

– Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

– Application Programming Interface (API)

– Database Gateways (ODBC, IDC, ADO)

• Markup languages– SGML, HTML, XML

Electronic Commerce

Electronic Commerce

This WeekWeb-Based Tools for Electronic Commerce

– Basic Requirements of a Web server

– Setting Up a Web Server

– Benchmarking Web Server Hardware and Software

– Web Server Software Feature Sets• Core capabilities• Site management• Application Development• Electronic commerce

– Web Server Software and Tools• Apache HTTP Server• Microsoft Internet Information Server• Netscape Enterprise Server, and• O’Reilly WebSite Professional

Electronic Commerce

Basic Requirements of a Web server

• The basic requirement for a merchant to have a Web presence or have an electronic commerce site, is – (i) a connection to the Internet – (ii) a Web server in the company network

• The Internet connection is provided by an ISP through a leased line

• The two main ingredients in a Web server are– its hardware– its software

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Hardware

Selecting a computer to serve as a Web server depends on several factors, such as:

• Operating system of the network – Unix operating system is found to be more rugged than

Windows, but Unix is more complex to manage than Windows

• Hardware requirement of the Web server software – A PC with a midrange CPU, small hard drive, and 32

megabytes of memory will perform poorly when compared with a high-end workstation or a powerful UNIX-based computer.

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Hardware (Contd..)

• Expected traffic or the number of transaction per unit time

– Running a large, enterprise-class application server (such as an

ERP system) on a personal computer is not feasible.

• Other software running on the same computer

– For example, running a Web server and a database server can

significantly slow down the performance of a computer.

• Scalability of the hardware

– Means upgrade of components such memory, disk space, disk

mirroring, or even connect additional Web servers if necessary.

Electronic Commerce

Setting Up a Web Server

• One can build a small Web server with an inexpensive PC (costing about $1,500) running on Windows 98 or NT

• Although, it is a good idea to start with a server-type computer offered by several leading PC manufacturers that costs about $3000

• A merchant may consider some benchmarking results of hardware and software combination before purchasing or leasing a web server

Electronic Commerce

Benchmarking Web Server Hardware and Software

Introduction

• Benchmarking a Web server is testing used to

compare performance of hardware and software

offered by various vendors

• The results of benchmark tests demonstrate that

there are measurable differences in various Web

server performance

Electronic Commerce

Benchmark Test

A benchmark test considers several factors such as:• The computer hardware• The Web server software• Network connection

– A Web server on a T3 connection can deliver Web pages to clients much faster than it could on a T1 connection.

• Throughput– It is the number of HTTP requests that a particular hardware and

software combination can process in a unit of time.

• Response Time– It is the amount of time that a server requires to process one

request.

• Type of Web page– static versus dynamic

Electronic Commerce

Benchmarking Software

WebStone is a popular benchmarking software that measures performance on various types of Web pages (static and dynamic) such as:

• HTML: This is the standard static Web page containing only HTML tags.

• CGI: Common Gateway Interface or CGI protocol causes the Web server to run another program and return the result to the Web server.

• API: Application Programming Interface or API is a set of protocols that uses “multithreading” to handle user requests of the dynamic Web pages. – API is more efficient than CGI, as CGI requires an individual

program to be brought to the Web server memory when requested by multiple users.

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

• All Web server software provide some basic features

which can be classified as: – Core capabilities

– Site management

– Application Construction, and

– Electronic commerce

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Core Capabilities

• Client Request Processing: A Web server processes client

requests that are sent using HTTP protocol, both for static and

dynamic pages

• IP-Sharing or Virtual Server: A Web server can work as many

virtual Web servers, serving many businesses with individual

domain names but all domains directing to the same IP address

of the computer

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Core Capabilities (contd..)

• Logical File: A Web server can have a logical file name

corresponding to a physical file

– The physical file may be in the same computer or in another

computer, and also the logical name and the physical name do not

have to be same

– The Web server translates a logical URL into a physical file address

– Example, the physical file “c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\default.htm” may be

configured as logical URL: www.Mybusiness.com/home.htm

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Core Capabilities (contd..)• Security: Web servers are located publicly on the Internet or

privately in an organizational intranet, usually behind the firewalls. – The public documents are configured to be viewed by anonymous

users

– For extranet users, the files and folders are configured for validation of username and password. Access controls provide or deny access to files based on the username or by extranet company URL

– Web servers allow processing digital certificates and private/public key pairs.

– Web servers also support Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Core Capabilities (contd..)• FTP: Web servers provide File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

services. Thus users can transfer files to and from the server.

• Searching: Search engines and indexing programs are

standard components of the Web server.

– Search engines or search tools search either the existing site or the

entire Web.

• Site Analysis: Web servers can capture visitor information that

are stored in a log file. Information includes:

– who is visiting the Web site (the visitor’s URL)

– how long the visitor browsed the site

– the date and time of each visit, and the pages visited

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Site Management• A Web server provides tools to manage multiple Web sites, file

security, virtual file, and log file analysis

• Administration of a Web server can be performed from a remote

computer in the network

• Administrators can grant or deny Web access to individual

computers, groups of computers, or entire domains

• Administrators can stop and restart all Web services without

stopping and restarting the computer

• Site management also include authoring tools such as Microsoft

Front page 2000

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Application Development

• Application development includes Web editors and extensions to

produce Web pages – either static or dynamic. These include

HTML editors such as FrontPage for static Web pages

• For dynamic Web pages, there are protocols such as Common

Gateway Interface (CGI), Application programming Interface (API),

and Active Server Pages (ASP) that are used by programs such

as Java, C++, and VBScriot to develop dynamic Web pages

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Application Development (Contd..)

• Active Server Pages (ASP):

– Developed by Microsoft, it is a server-side scripting technology to

build dynamic Web applications.

– With ASP, one can build Web pages with embedded query strings

for database manipulation using scripting languages such as

VBScript and JavaScript.

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Application Development (Contd..)

• Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and ActiveX Data Object (ADO) mechanisms, both developed by Microsoft, can be used to develop dynamic Web pages that use database connection of variety of databases from different manufactures (such as SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle)

• Reference: http://www.microsoft.com/data/techmat.htm

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Application Development (Contd..)

• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC):

– Similar to ODBC, JDBC is another technology developed by

Sun Microsystems, that is used for Web-database

applications,

– It is written in Java

– It runs on Unix Web servers

– Reference: http://java.sun.com/products/jdbc/index.html

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Electronic Commerce

• Some Web servers provide advanced services that support online selling and buying (such as shopping cart and catalog services)

• An electronic commerce software can also provide templates and other tools to quickly develop an e-commerce site. This might include templates for product browsing, shopping carts, and credit card

processing.

Electronic Commerce

Web Server Software Features

Electronic Commerce (contd..)

• An electronic commerce software is a separate software that

integrates with an existing Web server.

• Microsoft Commerce Server is an electronic commerce software

that enables businesses to engage customers, transact

business, and analyze commerce Web sites more effectively.

• Ref: http://www.microsoft.com/siteserver/commerce/default.htm

Electronic Commerce

Discussion Questions

• Name few companies that make Web servers

• At minimum what software are needed to run a Web server

• What does it mean by static Web page?

• What is a dynamic Web page?

• What technologies are used to create a dynamic Web page?

• What is ODBC?

• What is API?

• What is ADO?

• What CGI?

Electronic Commerce