Java Reference
In-Depth Information
In parallel with the early evolution of the Internet, organizations worldwide were imple-
menting their own networks for both intraorganization (that is, within an organization)
and interorganization (that is, between organizations) communication. A huge variety of
networking hardware and software appeared. One challenge was to enable these different
networks to communicate with each other. ARPA accomplished this by developing the In-
ternet Protocol (IP), which created a true “network of networks,” the current architecture
of the Internet. The combined set of protocols is now called
TCP/IP
.
Businesses rapidly realized that by using the Internet, they could improve their oper-
ations and offer new and better services to their clients. Companies started spending large
amounts of money to develop and enhance their Internet presence. This generated fierce
competition among communications carriers and hardware and software suppliers to meet
the increased infrastructure demand. As a result,
bandwidth
—the information-carrying
capacity of communications lines—on the Internet has increased tremendously, while
hardware costs have plummeted.
The
World Wide Web
(simply called “the web”) is a collection of hardware and software
associated with the Internet that allows computer users to locate and view multimedia-based
documents (documents with various combinations of text, graphics, animations, audios and
videos) on almost any subject. The introduction of the web was a relatively recent event. In
1989, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) began
to develop a technology for sharing information via “hyperlinked” text documents. Berners-
Lee called his invention the
HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
. He also wrote com-
munication protocols such as
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
to form the backbone
of his new hypertext information system, which he referred to as the World Wide Web.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded an organization, called the
World Wide Web Consor-
tium
(
W3C
,
www.w3.org),
devoted to developing web technologies. One of the W3C's
primary goals is to make the web universally accessible to everyone regardless of disabili-
ties, language or culture. In this topic, you'll use Java to build web-based applications.
In online Chapter 32, we include a substantial treatment of web services (Fig. 1.17). The
applications-development methodology of
mashups
enables you to rapidly develop power-
ful software applications by combining (often free) complementary web services and other
forms of information feeds. One of the first mashups combined the real-estate listings pro-
that showed the locations of homes for sale or rent in a given area.
Web services source
How it's used
Google Maps
Mapping services
Tw i t t e r
Microblogging
directory/1?sort=mashups
).
(Part 1 of 2.)
