Case study: The World Wide Web




The World Wide Web [www.w3.org I, Berners-Lee 1991] is an evolving system for publishing and accessing resources and services across the Internet. Through commonly available web browsers, users retrieve and view documents of many types, listen to audio streams and view video streams, and interact with an unlimited set of services. The Web began life at the European requirement to organize their knowledge. This means that documents contain links (or hyperlinks) – references to other documents and resources that are also stored in the Web. It is fundamental to the user’s experience of the Web that when they encounter a given image or piece of text within a document, this will frequently be accompanied by links to related documents and other resources. The structure of links can be arbitrarily complex and the set of resources that can be added is unlimited – the ‘web’ of links is indeed world-wide.
Bush [1945] conceived of hypertextual structures over 50 years ago; it was with the development of the Internet that this idea could be manifested on a world-wide scale.
The Web is an open system: it can be extended and implemented in new ways without disturbing its existing functionality. First, its operation is based on communication standards and document or content standards that are freely
published and widely implemented. For example, there are many types of browser, each in many cases implemented on several platforms; and there are many implementations of web servers. Any conformant browser can retrieve resources from any conformant server. So users have access to browsers on the majority of the devices that they use, from mobile phones to desktop computers.
Second, the Web is open with respect to the types of resource that can be published and shared on it. At its simplest, a resource on the Web is a web page or some other type of content that can be presented to the user, such as media files and documents in
Portable Document Format. If somebody invents, say, a new image-storage format, then images in this format can immediately be published on the Web. Users require a means of viewing images in this new format, but browsers are designed to accommodate new
content-presentation functionality in the form of ‘helper’ applications and ‘plug-ins’. The Web has moved beyond these simple data resources to encompass services, such as electronic purchasing of goods. It has evolved without changing its basic
architecture. The Web is based on three main standard technological components:
the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a language for specifying the contents and layout of pages as they are displayed by web browsers;
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), also known as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which identify documents and other resources stored as part of the Web;
a client-server system architecture, with standard rules for interaction (the HyperText Transfer Protocol – HTTP) by which browsers and other clients fetch documents and other resources from web servers. Figure shows some web servers, and browsers making requests to them. It is an important feature that users may locate and manage their own web servers anywhere on the Internet.

 

Case study: The World Wide Web

 

Centre for nuclear research (CERN), Switzerland, in 1989 as a vehicle for exchanging documents between a community of physicists connected by the Internet [Berners-Lee 1999]. A key feature of the Web is that it provides a hypertext structure among the documents that it stores, reflecting the users’ 

We now discuss these components in turn, and in so doing explain the operation of browsers and web servers when a user fetches web pages and clicks on the links within them.
HTML • The HyperText Markup Language [www.w3.org II] is used to specify the text and images that make up the contents of a
webpage and to specify how they are laid out and formatted for presentation to the user. A web page contains such structured items as headings, paragraphs,tablesand images. HTML is also used to specify links and which resources are associated with them.

Users may produce HTML by hand, using a standard text editor, but they more commonly use an HTML-aware ‘wysiwyg’ editor that generates HTML from a layout that they create graphically. A typical piece of HTML text follows



Frequently Asked Questions

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Ans: Reliability and security issues are critical in the design of most computer systems. The performance aspect of quality of service was originally defined in terms of responsiveness and computational throughput, but it has been redefined in terms of ability to meet timeliness guarantees, as discussed in the following paragraphs view more..
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Ans: oncealment from the user and the application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system, so that the system is perceived as a whole rather than as a collection of independent components view more..
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Ans: he process that manages a shared resource could take one client request at a time. But that approach limits throughput. Therefore services and applications generally allow multiple client requests to be processed concurrently. view more..
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Ans: The Web began life at the European centre for nuclear research (CERN), Switzerland, in 1989 as a vehicle for exchanging documents between a community of physicists connected by the Internet [Berners-Lee 1999]. A key feature of the Web is that it provides a hypertext structure among the documents that it stores, reflecting the users’ requirement to organize their knowledge. view more..
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Ans: Resource sharing is the main motivating factor for constructing distributed systems. Resources such as printers, files, web pages or database records are managed by servers of the appropriate type. For example, web servers manage web pages and other web resources. Resources are accessed by clients – for example, the clients of web servers are generally called browsers. view more..
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Ans: Physical models consider the types of computers and devices that constitute a system and their interconnectivity, without details of specific technologies. view more..
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Ans: The discussion and examples of Chapter 1 suggest that distributed systems of different types share important underlying properties and give rise to common design problems. In this chapter we show how the properties and design issues of distributed systems can be captured and discussed through the use of descriptive models view more..
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Ans: A physical model is a representation of the underlying hardware elements of a distributed system that abstracts away from specific details of the computer and networking technologies employed. view more..
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Ans: Major concerns are to make the system reliable, manageable, adaptable and cost-effective. The architectural design of a building has similar aspects – it determines not only its appearance but also its general structure and architectural style (gothic, neo-classical, modern) and provides a consistent frame of reference for the design view more..
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Ans: From a system perspective, the answer is normally very clear in that the entities that communicate in a distributed system are typically processes, leading to the prevailing view of a distributed system as processes coupled with appropriate interprocess communication paradigms view more..
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Ans: ion for a given problem domain. This is a large topic, and many architectural patterns have been identified for distributed systems. In this section, we present several key architectural patterns in distributed systems, including layering and tiered architectures and the related concept of thin clients (including the specific mechanism of virtual network computing). We also examine web services as an architectural pattern and give pointers to others that may be applicable in distributed systems. view more..
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Ans: As mentioned in the introduction, networks are everywhere and underpin many everyday services that we now take for granted: the Internet and the associated World Wide Web, web search, online gaming, email, social networks, eCommerce, etc. To illustrate this point further, consider Figure 1.1 , which describes a selected range of key commercial or social application sectors highlighting some of the associated established or emerging uses of distributed systems technology. view more..
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Ans: If another organization develops or runs a computer application for your organization, that practice is called outsourcing. Outsourcing includes a spectrum of working arrangements view more..
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Ans: We can group organizations that produce software into six major categories. view more..
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Ans: Once you have decided to purchase off-the-shelf software rather than write some or all of the software for your new system, how do you decide what to buy? Several criteria need consideration, and special ones may arise with each potential software purchase. view more..
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Ans: Reuse is the use of previously written software resources in new applications. Because so many bits and pieces of applications are relatively generic across applications, it seems intuitive that great savings can be achieved in many areas if those generic bits and pieces do not have to be written anew each time they are needed. view more..
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Ans: Pine Valley Furniture (PVF) Company manufactures high-quality wood furniture and distributes it to retail stores within the United States. Its product lines include dinette sets, stereo cabinets, wall units, living room furniture, and bedroom furniture. view more..
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Ans: During project initiation the project manager performs several activities that assess the size, scope, and complexity of the project, and establishes procedures to support subsequent activities. view more..



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