LECTURE 1 – Introduction to the course and the World Wide Web

Why do this course, why is it going to help me?

Some possible conclusions from looking at the contents page

1. I should have done a business course/ I’m going to fail.

2. Why were we doing all the bits and bytes and network protocols before Christmas?
3. Why are we doing JavaScript, Databases and stuff, if I was going to be a programmer then I’d
have done a computer science course.

1) You may actually be doing a business programme, and this is your only computing course.
Alternatively you may be doing an Information Systems Programme. Either way this course gives
you an understanding of the more technical side of things. To fulfil any management role today you
need an understanding of how technology works and what it can do. Examine the true conversation
below: - (*1)

Man who hasn’t done a CS&IT course:

‘Can you network those two windows XP machines together?’

Computer Boffin (and part time mechanic): Sucks in air through teeth

‘Windows XP is a bit of a bugger to network you’ll need an ASDL router, bi-pole network connections
and the set-up is very tricky - it’s a 4-man job for the whole week. With materials and all can’t see you
getting much change out of two grand mate. Tell you what as you’re a mate I’ll do it for one and a half
grand if you throw in free tea. Can’t say fairer than that.’

2+3) Essentially the course is attempting to bring together two main areas of business, and Web
creation areas (you covered the technical side before Christmas). The fact that business is using
computers and the Internet is undeniable. It is almost inconceivable that you could get a job that did not
involve some exposure to both. I personally believe the following: -

 Business people should understand computing, because they have to make decisions on
technology
o Can we use a computer for this, what software could we use?
o Can we sell on line, what about credit card fraud?
o How do we make a good website which people can use easily

 Computing people should understand business

The days of being able to sit in a room programming assembler in your anorak have long gone.
Possibly 95% of computer work is to solve a business problem, if you can’t understand the
business problem then how can you produce a solution. If you don’t know what an invoice is
(and what it is for) – can you write a Transaction Processing System?

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The course essentially has the following structure

1. What the Internet is, how does it work, why do businesses need/use it.

2. Programming in JAVA, HTML etc. – learn what makes a good web site by producing your own.

3. Creating and Validating an online database (ACCESS)

4. General Business concepts Data, Information, Knowledge

(*1) All conversations have actually taken place except when the facts have been changed to illustrate a
point.

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are growing this week, after the shock announcement that the man who runs the
worldwideweb is to retire.
FEARS
Lionel Thruxton, OF
63, has A GLOBAL
admitted that the job is INTERNET COLLAPSE
getting too big for his ageing
shoulders. Speaking from the converted shed in Frampton-upon-Severn
from which he runs the internet, he told reporters, "It's all a bit much for me at
my age.

HOBBY

"I started the internet as a hobby in 1989. I got the idea from my model railway
set, with trains taking things from station to station, so I connected all the stations
together and had a working protoype in a couple of weeks.
Pipe-smoking Thruxton thinks his invention might be worth up to £300,000 and is
currently looking for a buyer to take the shed full
of equipment off his hands. B&Q, Pete Waterman and Sewage France are thought
to be amongst the bidders.

Source VIZ
Is this how the Internet works, or is it really a big shed in America?
vol 130
page 22
Is the ‘train thing’ complete rubbish or is there some sense in it?

Discuss giving reasons who would ‘do the Internet best’ out of B&Q, Pete Waterman and Sewage
France?

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The World Wide Web

Before the Internet there was the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which
was created by the American Department of Defence, as an experiment. The first ARPANET nodes were
installed in 1969 as a direct product of the Cold War. One of the reasons for having a network was to
prevent the enemy completely putting out the computer system, e.g. if one bit was bombed then the rest of
the network would continue. By 1983 the ARPANET had become so successful that it was no longer
considered experimental, and control passed from the Department of Defence. It became known as the
ARPA Internet.

How the World Wide Web Works

The World Wide Web is a repository for information spread all over the world and linked together. It uses
the concept of hypertext. In a hypertext environment, information is stored in a set of documents. The
documents are linked together by having pointers (or hypertext links) embedded into the documents.
Different people ‘own’ different parts of the Internet, even down to the fact your webpage is part of the
Internet. This is likely to be stored via. a service provider (aol, tiscali, wanado, etc.) They sell
‘webspace’ (storage) to host your page. The Internet is often described as a network of networks in that
anything connected can be joined together. This would not be possible without governments paying for
and maintaining a backbone connection to join together all the networks.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

To access a Web page an address is needed, and to facilitate access the WWW uses the concept of
locators. The URL describes the location or Internet address of the specific resource that we want to use.
A URL can point to a different Web page, to another location in the current page or to a component of a
page e.g. an image. For example the URL of the University of Greenwich home page is
http://www.gre.ac.uk and http://www.yahoo.com is Yahoo’s home page. Every URL must conform to a
set of rules. The rules allow browsers and other programs to understand the URL and use it reliably to
move from one location to another across the Internet.

When you create your Web page it will have a URL that is unique to your page, e.g.
www.gre.ac.uk/~bc115 this allows anyone on the World Wide Web to find your page and view the
information that you place there. The computer, which stores the page and allows access to the Web page
information, is called the host. The name of the computer can be an alias. Today, Web pages are usually
stored on computers that have names that start with www; e.g. www.atlas.gre.ac.uk but they do not have
to (e.g. cms1.gre.ac.uk/teachmat).

An area on the big University Web server (Unix machine) at www.gre.ac.uk has been allocated to you.
This is where your web pages will be stored so that they can be published on the Web.

URL defines - protocol, domain name, path and filename. URLs are the heart of navigation across the
WWW.

Protocol - The protocol tells the browser what kind of resource it is accessing. The browser must know
how to interpret what it finds. There are seven common protocols currently in use, but http:// is the most
commonly used, also FTP (File Transfer Protocol), mailto, news and Telnet.

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 Domain – specifies the physical location. A domain name starts with two slashes and ends with a single
slash. You can specify a domain by its IP address or by using the domain name, which relates to the IP
address. IP stands for Internet Protocol. IP addresses are four sets of one, two or three digits separated by
full stops. They define the Internet address of a particular computer, which uniquely identifies it. Each
computer or host must have a unique address on the Internet. For example, the IP address of Atlas is
193.60.64.60.

If we want to use a domain name instead, then the browser must translate that name into an IP address
using the Domain Name Server (DNS). If the domain name can not be translated, then the annoying
message will appear “DNS unable to translate domain name”. The domain name allows users to address
computers by a name rather than use the IP address, which is obviously easier for a person to remember
than a long number.

The DNS database of Domain names and the corresponding IP addresses can not be held on one machine.
As a truly distributed resource, it is maintained by many organisations, each manages a little bit of it.
DNS defines a tree structure, and each node on the tree is owned by one of the naming authorities. The
owner of a node can create any number of child nodes, but each must have a unique name.

A sample part of the internet

.

edu com org net uk

utexas ohio tic sum uniformum ac co

health gre ukc

coverups csm ee images

waitinglist.html directorswage.html backgrounds.html (*)

.
Many URLs also have additional parts specifying uk
directory paths and file names, etc. The path is the
pathname of the file where the information is located.
Note that the path can contain slashes (/) that separate ac
directories from subdirectories and files in the UNIX
operating system. Here “backgrounds.html” is the file gre
name.

E.g. backgrounds.html (*)

http://www.gre.ac.uk/images/backgrounds.html images

images
Protocol
Backgrounds.html
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 Note that the root node is unnamed. Every country in the world (including the USA) has a top-level
domain that is identified by a two-letter country code. This allows geographical partitioning of the top-
level domains. However, most organisations in the US register a domain under one of the other top-level
domains, (e.g. com, edu). Note normal writing is a directory and italic.html is a document within the
directory

Give the full address for the document waitinglist.html

How many documents are there in the coverups directory?

In the images directory?

Many sites have short cuts for files names in-built

E.g. http://www.gre.ac.uk/~bc11

This is my home directory, which is NOT stored in the top level of the university server; there are several
subdirectories e.g. full address is

http://www.gre.ac.uk/cms/staff/bc11

This saves typing. The ‘~’ represents other directories. How can we do this? What if someone else’s
home page is located at bc11?

Email Addresses

name name of server uk company

Fredsmith77@tiscali.co.uk

For the following email address indicate name, severer and where it is located. Also explain why two
people can have the same name

Fredsmith77@health.gov.fr

ISP

Internet Service Provider – will host your Web pages, usually on a large multiprocessing computer (not a
PC).

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Browsers, hypertext and HTML

There are many commercial browsers that interpret and display Web documents, and most of them use
the same architecture. A browser is made up of three parts:

 The controller gets input from the keyboard or mouse.

 The client program will find and access the document.
 After the document has been accessed, the controller uses one of the interpreters to display the
document on screen.

There are three basic types of documents on the World Wide Web.
 Static documents have a fixed content and are created and stored in a server. The client can only get
a copy of it: i.e. the contents of the file are determined when it is created, not when it is used
(therefore a user can not change it). When the client accesses the document, a copy of the document is
sent, and the user displays it using a browsing program such as Netscape or IE.

 Dynamic document does not exist in a predefined format, but is created whenever a browser requests
the document. When a request arrives, the Web server runs an application program that creates the
dynamic document. Because a new document is created for each request, the contents of the dynamic
document can vary from one request to another.

(1) What is the best show on TV (2)

Website accesses a Database
Neighbours VOTE (e.g. Access)
NOW!
Current state
User News Night Neighbours 1787
clicks News Night 3
this
button One vote is added to
Neighbours making
it ?

(3) Results page shown

The best show on TV is Neighbours Note the parts in italics are

the parts of the page
The current votes are generated on the fly by the
Data Base
Neighbours 1788
News Night 3

What would be the implications if we used a ‘Static page’ to try and do this?

What do you think would happen to the server if 10,000 people all voted at once?

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  Active Document

The problem of overloading either the server or the network connecting the server and the client can be
address by using the concept of an Active Document. One example of this is Flash, which allows
complex animations to be displayed on the web. Consider a 10MB (10,000,000 byte) animation, being
loaded over a 57.6 Kbit/sec = 57,600 bits/sec.

Hint there are ___ bits in a Byte.

This means that it will transfer bytes every second.
How long will the animation take to download (in minutes)?

Flash solves the problem in the following way, when you first come across a page using Flash if it is not
on your machine then the Flash program will be automatically downloaded to your machine, this may
obviously take some time as the file will be several Megabytes. Once Flash is downloaded onto you
machine the graphics do not have to be sent over the web but simply a set of instructions (which if put
into the Flash program will produce the graphics ON YOUR MACHINE). If the set of instructions is
250KBytes 250,000Bytes, calculate the time taken to download the animations.

If Flash were used the program would be said to be ‘running on the client side’. What does this mean?
Hint a standard ‘static page would be said to be ‘running on the server side’.

To enable the use of active documents, Sun Microsystems has defined a technology and a language called
Java. Java is a combination of three components: programming language, runtime environment and a
class library. The programming language is used to create programs at the server site. It is an object-
oriented language that has many similarities to C++. The runtime environment component is used at the
client site to run the program in binary form. The class library is a collection of predefined objects to
make object-oriented programming easier. Java uses the term applet to define an active document
program.

Notice now the Client is responsible for running the program rather than the server when Flash and
JAVA are used.

HTML
Hypertext mark-up language is a language for writing web pages. It is called a mark up language
because the only thing it does is to tell the browser how to format web pages. Pages may be viewed using
any number of browsers e.g. IE, Netscape and Mosaic. The browser fetches the page requested, interprets
the text and formatting commands and displays the page. Click on a link and the browser will fetch that
page and display it. HTML is universal (using ASCII characters) and will therefore be displayed correctly
on most browsers. Why not use a word processor?

The history of the Internet – you’ve done if 15 times before

But an Internet course must have it – that is the law!

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