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see a web page at an e-business that simply meets their needs but behind the
scenes the e-business server is not interacting with a single web site but rather
with multiple servers in a network of applications. To understand this important
new development, we need to start with some historical perspective on how
computer applications get created.
The early days
In the 1950s and 1960s computer programming required that the programmer be
an expert with the particular computer that his or her employer had. It was like
learning to drive a car. Not any car – one specific make and model of car. Being
an expert driver of that car gave you no credentials or even capability to drive
any other kind of car. If the organization got a new kind of computer, all the
programming had to be redone. Users of the system had to make a request by
fax, form, or phone and the request would be entered into the application
program by someone else and then, at the end of the day, a “batch” of the day’s
inputs was processed and the user would get the results the next day by
receiving a printed report of some kind.
During the 1970s and 1980s the online world simplified things quite a bit. Inputs
could be made “real time” while a customer or user was on the phone. A
customer service representative could take the information over the phone, enter
it directly into a system, get the results immediately and report back to the person
on the phone. Some progress was made in making things more compatible from
system to system by the establishment of common languages and protocols for
databases and communications. However, the programming to do this was still
very specific to the particular kind of computing system. In fact things got even
more complicated to program because of the real-time nature of the applications
and the need to integrate across numerous processes.
The web
The web took things a big leap forward. At last there was a common way (the
browser) for accessing and displaying information, even though the applications
that run on the server -- that do the pricing, inventory lookups, shipping
estimates, invoicing, etc. -- are still created with various languages which are
specific to the vendor or system. The web server applications have also become
very monolithic; i.e. in order to fulfill the expectations of customers on the web
the application has to do the whole job. Soup to nuts; present the right price,
confirm if the item is in stock, calculate shipping, and confirm the status of the
order. Increasingly, customers want to get access directly into the supply chain
and see exactly where things stand. In short, applications are getting larger and
more complicated -- harder, not easier.
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