Lesson 1

Now that you have planned your site, you have entered a crucial phase. You are now ready to pick specific tools and products to create the site. This course provides a "vendor-neutral" approach to the concept of e-commerce. In addition to vendor-neutral content and concepts, you will also be exposed to various e-commerce vendor applications.
By the end of this module, you will know how to:

1. Describe the elements of a Web server
2. Select Web server software
3. Assess Web site development software
4. Assess support and database software requirements
5. Configure hardware and software for security
6. Assess the tasks required to integrate with legacy systems
7. Assess outsourcing options

In the next lesson, Web servers will be discussed.

Successful design, implementation, and utilization of Internet-based systems require a thorough knowledge of several technologies, theories, and supporting disciplines. Internet and web technologies researchers and practitioners have had to consult many resources to find answers. Some of these sources concentrate on technologies and infrastructures, some on social and legal issues, and some on applications of internet-based systems. This module provides some of the relevant information in a comprehensive manner with a lively format. Each module incorporates core Internet topics, practical applications, and coverage of the emerging issues in the internet and web technologies field.

Infrastructure is the foundation or framework that supports a system or organization. In computing, infrastructure is composed of physical and virtual resources that support the flow, storage, processing and analysis of data. Infrastructure

1. may be centralized within a data center, or
2. it may be decentralized and spread across several data centers that are either controlled by the organization or by a third party, such as a colocation facility or cloud provider.

In a data center, infrastructure includes the 1) power, 2) cooling and 3) building elements necessary to support hardware. On the internet, infrastructure also includes transmission media, such as cables, satellites, antennas, routers, aggregators, repeaters and other network components that control transmission paths. Cloud computing provides a flexible IT infrastructure in which resources can be added and removed as workloads change. (IaaS) Infrastructure as a Service model uses a third-party provider to host hardware, software, servers, storage and other infrastructure components on behalf of its users.
The way IT infrastructures are created is continually changing. Heutzutage, some vendors provide pre-engineered blocks of compute, storage and network equipment that optimize the IT hardware and virtualization platform into a single system that can be easily interconnected to other systems. This modular approach is called converged infrastructure.

A common topic of discussion in telecommunications today is the notion of converged networks in which one infrastructure is used to carry

1. voice,
2. data, and
3. multimedia content.

Although the emphasis in today's discussion is on a common transport technology set, converged networks also must include common interface and operational technologies as well. In this sense, integrated services digital network (ISDN) and broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) represent two earlier attempts at converged telecommunication networks. Although the deployment of ISDN in the world's public telecommunication networks has not reached the levels its developers had anticipated, the technologies that underlie it have had an impact far beyond the number of terminals and switches based on these standards. In fact, the very body of standards that define ISDN and B-ISDN represents a realization that a coherent, standards-based approach to telecommunications technology is the only way to ensure consistent progress and provide fair access to the market for all customers, equipment vendors, and service providers.
The development of standards for ISDN may also represent one approach to this process that can be contrasted with the approach that has characterized that for the Internet. In the ISDN model, based in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) body of multinational technology experts, standards are created and agreed in total before any deployment generally occurs. This normally means that there is a considerable development period before information is available for guidance on products and services.
In the Internet model, managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), standards are developed, tested, and deployed incrementally, which allows the process to track more readily rapid changes in technological capability. This latter approach, however, does not always reflect the full impact of new concepts and will often result in the need to render previous standards obsolete with some resulting disruption in the market.
Perhaps ISDN, especially the narrowband version, is a victim of bad timing. When it was initially defined in the 1970s and 1980s, no one could conceive of a need for end user capabilities as high as 64 Mega bits per second data communication .