The internet as a platform

Abstract

As is well known, the internet was born as a communication infrastructure for data sharing between large government research labs in the US, and soon grew to include academic institutions across the world. The development of the NCSA Mosaic web-browser in 1993 sparked the rapid expansion of internet use beyond these boundaries into a platform for sharing documents, using the HTTP protocol and HTML markup languages developed by Tim Berners Lee at CERN, Geneva, in 1990. Using a browser, information ‘published’ over the internet could be accessed anonymously by the public at large, giving rise to the ‘world wide web’. The subsequent history of the commercialization of the web and the dot-com boom is also well known. In this chapter we explore how and why the internet also evolved into a platform for enterprise applications, eventually giving birth to the cloud computing paradigm. INTERNET TECHNOLOGY AND WEB-ENABLED APPLICATIONS Internet-based applications rely fundamentally on HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, and HTML, the HyperText Markup Language; both are now standards defined by the world wide web consortium (W3C). Browsers, such as Internet Explorer, and servers, such as HTTPD (HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon) implement these standards to enable content publishing over the internet. Other technologies such as XML and SOAP are also important, and will be covered in later chapters. Here we review the essential aspects of these underlying technologies that are critical to understanding internet-based enterprise applications and cloud computing.