Technology

Technology provides better, faster and more efficient ways of information storage, processing, accessibility, and presentation. From cuneiform on clay to the printed word on the paper, to digital bits in the electronic circuits, the transfer and processing of information is continually improving.

Storage
Database mangement systems store data in an organized format to facilitate data retrieval and maintenance. They provide security and transaction services to maintain data integrity. Most of the large enterprise information systems rely on relational database management systems. It organizes data into a set of tables, each one representing an area the organization needs to maintain information about. These tables are related to one another depending on the organization's needs. The character data as well as multimedia files can be maintained using these systems.

Processing
As the direct access memory size and processor speed increased, the speed and volume of information processing also improved.

Internet
Internet is how computers from different geographical area are connected together. It is a concept rather than an entity. The concept is important and a revolution because it changed the way the information is stored, distributed, and retrieved. It revolutionized the amount of information available, when it is available and to whom and the way it is retrieved. The quality and content of the information is another matter.

WWW
To communicate and share data while using different computer platforms and software, Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) created a plan. A large, shared database of information. It was spread out over as many computers as necessary, and no one was in charge of it. Hypertext would be used to query the database and could create relationships between the data with hyperlinks. Berners-Lee called his concept the World Wide Web.

HTML
World Wide Web is a great concept. But inorder to make it a reality Berners-Lee had to overcome other issues like:

* How to incorporate incompatible platforms, operating systems, and software into a single system.

* How to create a robust hierarchical system that would stand the test of time.

* How to deal with nontextual information.

* How to organize information without limiting the indexing to one particular format or perspective.

The ultimate solution to all of these problems was a distributed hypertext system. Participants kept data on their own computers, which were connected to a publicly available network to facilitate access. Once the ultimate public network, the Internet, was incorporated into the system it truly would become a World Wide Web. Making the solution a reality involved creating client and server software; generating appropriate protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); and, of course, creating HTML as the universal language of the Web.

CGI
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. A plain HTML document that the Web daemon retrieves is static, which means it exists in a constant state: a text file that doesn't change. A CGI program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information.

Java Web Technology
In the Java 2 Platform, Web components provide the dynamic extension capabilities for a Web server. Web components are either Java Servlets or JSP pages. Servlets are Java programming language classes that dynamically process requests and construct responses. JSP pages are text-based documents that execute as servlets but allow a more natural approach to creating static content. Although servlets and JSP pages can be used interchangeably, each has its own strengths. Servlets are best suited to service-oriented Web applications and managing the control functions of a presentation-oriented application, such as dispatching requests and handling nontextual data.

Web Services
Web services are services that are made available from a business's Web server for Web users or other Web-connected programs. Providers of Web services are generally known as application service providers. Users can access some Web services through a peer-to-peer arrangement rather than by going to a central server. Some services can communicate with other services and this exchange of procedures and data is generally enabled by a class of software known as middleware. Services previously possible only with the older standardized service known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) increasingly are likely to become Web services. Besides the standardization and wide availability to users and businesses of the Internet itself, Web services are also increasingly enabled by the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a means of standardizing data formats and exchanging data. XML is the foundation for the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).