Overview

Internet applications are necessarily distributed applications. Customers from anywhere in the world can access a Web application using a Web browser. The application's developers can't be sure what types of hardware or software the customers will be using. If an Internet-based supply chain application is designed to allow one company to interact with another, it can even be more complex, since the variety of different hardware, software, and legacy applications that will need to be integrated will be even more diverse.

To remain competitive, companies will want their new e-business applications developed quickly, and they will need to change them rapidly as business practices and Web technologies evolve. At the same time, software developers will have to learn and use new technologies to meet the new e-business requirements described in the last chapter. This suggests that IT groups will need all the help they can get. IT groups that try to stick with older ways of developing applications will flounder and fail. IT groups that succeed will use off-the-shelf products and open standards whenever they can to minimize their development effort. In other words, successful IT developers will focus on strategic business software development tasks and buy infrastructure and software components whenever they can, to minimize their involvement in tactical development.

The key open standard for the new era is obviously the Internet itself and other protocols like HTML and XML that are supported by W3C, the Internet standards consortium. The basic Internet standards, by themselves, however, are insufficient.