Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 7.8
Creating Web Pages
Adobe Dreamweaver makes Web
design nearly as easy as using a
word processor.
Some Web developers are creating programs and procedures to combine two or more
Web applications into a new service, called a
mash-up
. A mash-up is named for the process
of mixing two or more hip-hop songs into one song. A Web site that provides crime infor-
mation, for example, can be mashed up with a mapping Web site to produce a Web site with
crime information placed on top of a map of a metropolitan area. People are becoming
creative in how they mash up several Web sites into new ones. Google and Yahoo both
provide developers with tools for creating mash-ups. Google's is called the Mashup Editor
(
editor.googlemashups.com
), and Yahoo's is called Pipes (
pipes.yahoo.com
).
12
Some corporations maintain and manage their large enterprise Web sites using a
content
management system (CMS)
. A CMS consists of both software and support. Companies that
provide a CMS can charge from $15,000 to more than $500,000 annually, depending on
the complexity of the Web site being maintained and the services being performed. Leading
CMS vendors include BroadVision, EBT, FileNet, and Vignette. Many of these products
are popular because they take a newer approach to developing and maintaining Web content
called Web services, discussed next.
Many products make it easy to develop Web content and interconnect Web services,
discussed in the next section. Microsoft, for example, provides a development and Web
services platform called .NET. The .NET platform allows developers to use different pro-
gramming languages to create and run programs, including those for the Web. The .NET
platform also includes a rich library of programming code to help build XML Web applica-
tions. Other popular Web development platforms include Sun JavaServer Pages, Microsoft
ASP, and Adobe Cold Fusion. See Figure 7.9.
Web Services
Web services
consist of standards and tools that streamline and simplify communication
among Web sites, promising to revolutionize the way we develop and use the Web for business
and personal purposes. Internet companies, including Amazon, eBay, and Google, are now
using Web services. Amazon, for example, has developed Amazon Web Services (AWS) to
make the contents of its huge online catalog available to other Web sites or software appli-
cations. Mitsubishi Motors of North America uses Web services to link about 700 automotive
dealers on the Internet.
The key to Web services is XML. Just as HTML was developed as a standard for for-
matting Web content into Web pages, XML is used within a Web page to describe and
Web services
Standards and tools that streamline
and simplify communication among
Web sites for business and personal
purposes.
