Electronic Commerce Technology

WEB SERVER HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Introduction

The basic requirement for a merchant to have a Web presence or have an electronic commerce site, is (i) a connection to the Internet, and (ii) a Web server in the company network. The two main ingredients in a Web server are its hardware and software. In this chapter, we will discuss these requirements of a Web server.

Web Server Hardware

A merchant should think carefully when making a decision on the Web server computer. The decision depends on factors such as:

 Operating system of the network. Unix operating system is found to be more rugged than that of 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.

 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 -- meaning upgrade of components such memory, disk space, disk mirroring, or even connect additional Web servers if necessary. Setting Up a Web Server

Copyright 2002: Mohammad A. Rob 1 Setting up a Web server doesn’t require a lot of money. One can build a small Web server with an inexpensive PC (costing about $1,500) running on Windows 98 or NT. But it is a good idea to start with a server-type computer offered by several leading PC manufacturers.

Web Server Software Feature Sets

All Web server software provide some basic features which can be classified as:  Core capabilities  Site management  Application Construction, and  Electronic commerce

Core Capabilities

The most fundamental duty of a Web server is to process and respond to Web client requests that are sent using HTTP protocol. For a static page, the server locates the page and returns it as a formatted HTML document to the client computer. For a dynamic page, the server invokes other programs or database, formats the HTML page, and returns it to the client.

IP-Sharing or Virtual Server: A Web server can work as many virtual Web servers. This means that many businesses can share a Web server’s IP address. A virtual server or virtual host is a feature that maintains more than one server on one machine. Thus different groups can have their own domain name, but all domain names refer to the same physical Web server.

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. A Web administrator normally configures this physical-to-logical file naming. For example, the physical file “c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\default.htm” may be configured as logical URL: www.Mybusiness.com/home.htm.

Copyright 2002: Mohammad A. Rob 2 Security: Web servers are located publicly on the Internet or privately on organizational intranet, usually behind firewalls. The public documents are to be viewed by any user, and the folders containing public documents are configured to be viewed by anonymous users.

Security and authentication services are set for extranet users, in which case the users are accessing Web files from the public Internet. 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 URL.

Web servers allow processing digital certificates and private/public key pairs. Web servers also support Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which is a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private information securely over the public Internet. Electronic commerce sites use SSL to accept confidential information such as credit card numbers from Web consumers.

FTP: Web servers provide File Transfer Protocol (FTP) services. Thus users can transfer files to and from the server. This is useful when users develop and test Web pages in their personal computer (even dynamic Web pages using a personal Web server) before moving to the company Web server.

Security is also an issue using FTP services. A user may have to be authenticated with a username and password unless anonymous access is provided for files and folders.

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 for requested documents. An indexing program provides full-text indexing whereby indexes are generated for documents stored on the server.

Site Analysis: Web servers can capture visitor information, including 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. These data are stored in a log file. Log files can yield information that can be used for Internet marketing.

A Web server provides tools to manage the services mentioned above, such as management of 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, as well as script checking, HTML validation, and identification of orphan pages, broken links, error-prone pages etc.

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) and Application programming Interface (API) that are used by programs such as Java and C++ to develop dynamic Web pages.

Active Server Pages (ASP) developed by Microsoft, 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.

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

Similar to ODBC, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is another technology developed by Sun, that is used for Web-database applications, written in Java and it runs on Unix Web servers. Reference: http://java.sun.com/products/jdbc/index.html

Some Web servers provide advanced services that support online selling and buying (such as shopping cart and catalog services). An electronic commerce software can 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.

But in most cases, an electronic commerce software is a separate software that integrates with the existing Web server.

Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition is an Internet commerce server that enables businesses to engage customers, transact business, and analyze commerce Web sites more effectively.

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

Case Study: http://www.microsoft.com/solutions/ecommerce/OffDepot.htm

Web Server Software and Tools

There are many Web server software available in the market, but only a few of them are leading in the total market share. Some of them run on only one operating system while others run on several operating systems.

Netcraft, a networking consulting company, periodically surveys on the number and type of Web servers used by various organizations. The four most popular Web servers are:

 Apache HTTP Server  Microsoft Internet Information Server  Netscape Enterprise Server, and  O’Reilly WebSite Professional

Of these, the Apache and Microsoft Web servers are leading in the market. These servers account for about 75% of the intranet Web servers. Visit http://netcraft.com for the latest survey results.

Apache runs on a wide variety of operating system such as Microsoft NT, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux. It has a built-in search engine, an HTML authoring tool, and it supports FTP.

Apache can be managed either from the server console or remotely using a Web browser. It supports CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and API (Application Programming Interface) programming interface.

Apache also supports ASP (active server pages) and Java servlets (Java scripts), both of which are server-side scripting programs. It also supports Java applets (or client-side scripting) that runs in the browser.

Apache supports the ODBC standard and can access databases in Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, Oracle, and Sybase SQL Server.

For further information, visit: http://www.apache.org/httpd.html

Microsoft Internet Information Server

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is the second most popular Web server in the public domain and it is the most popular Web server in the intranet domain. This is because of the largest share of Windows NT operating system in the PC market.

IIS runs only on the Windows NT operating system and it comes free with the NT Server. It includes a search engine and the Microsoft FrontPage HTML authoring tool. It also supports FTP.

It can be managed locally, from a browser, or from a remote computer within the local network using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). MMC is a Microsoft network administrative tool that can be used to administer all servers in the NT network.

Because Windows NT allows many IP addresses to be assigned to a single network interface card, IIS supports multiple virtual Web hosting.

Copyright 2002: Mohammad A. Rob 6 Security is tightly integrated with the Windows NT operating system. Access control can be limited to a user, group, directory, or file. IIS allows secured socket layer (SSL) and includes a built-in certificate server.

IIS supports its native Active Server Pages (ASP), ActiveX Servers (equivalent to Java applets), and ISAPI (equivalent to API). It supports many common databases (Access, SQL server, Oracle, FoxPro) through appropriate ODBC drivers.

For further information, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/server/features/web.asp

Netscape Enterprise server

Netscape Enterprise Server (NES) is popular Web software, which is a descendant of the original web server program. It is aimed at sites that service a large number of hits (as high as 100 million per day).

NES runs on both Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix) and NT environment. It has all other features like Microsoft IIS and some are even better such as file transfer mechanism and administration.