WWW - World Wide Web

WWW

The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.

The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and released in 1992.

Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.

How it works

Viewing a Web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a Web browser, or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The Web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it.

First, the server-name portion of the URL is resolved into an IP address using the global, distributed Internet database known as the domain name system, or DNS. This IP address is necessary to contact and send data packets to the Web server.

The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request to the Web server at that particular address.

In the case of a typical Web page, the HTML text of the page is requested first and parsed immediately by the Web browser, which will then make additional requests for images and any other files that form a part of the page.

Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based on the number of 'page views' or associated server 'hits', or file requests, which take place.

Having received the required files from the Web server, the browser then renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML, CSS, and other Web languages. Any images and other resources are incorporated to produce the on-screen Web page that the user sees.

Standards

Many formal standards and other technical specifications define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange.

Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organizations.

Usually, when Web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:

Recommendations for markup languages, especially HTML and XHTML, from the W3C. These define the structure and interpretation of hypertext documents.

Recommendations for stylesheets, especially CSS, from the W3C.

Standards for ECMAScript (usually in the form of JavaScript), from Ecma International.

Recommendations for the Document Object Model, from W3C.

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Internet, such as hypertext documents and images. URIs, often called URLs, are defined by the IETF's RFC 3986 / STD 66: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, as well as its predecessors and numerous URI scheme-defining RFCs;

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), especially as defined by RFC 2616:

HTTP/1.1 and RFC 2617: HTTP Authentication, which specify how the browser and server authenticate each other.

Java

A significant advance in Web technology was Sun Microsystems' Java platform. It enables Web pages to embed small programs (called applets) directly into the view. These applets run on the end-user's computer, providing a richer user interface than simple Web pages.

Java client-side applets never gained the popularity that Sun had hoped for a variety of reasons, including lack of integration with other content (applets were confined to small boxes within the rendered page) and the fact that many computers at the time were supplied to end users without a suitably installed Java Virtual Machine, and so required a download by the user before applets would appear.

Adobe Flash now performs many of the functions that were originally envisioned for Java applets, including the playing of video content, animation, and some rich GUI features. Java itself has become more widely used as a platform and language for server-side and other programming.

JavaScript

JavaScript, on the other hand, is a scripting language that was initially developed for use within Web pages. The standardized version is ECMAScript.

While its name is similar to Java, JavaScript was developed by Netscape and has very little to do with Java, although the syntax of both languages is derived from the C programming language.

In conjunction with a Web page's Document Object Model (DOM), JavaScript has become a much more powerful technology than its creators originally envisioned.^{[citation needed]} The manipulation of a page's DOM after the page is delivered to the client has been

called Dynamic HTML (DHTML), to emphasize a shift away from static HTML displays.

In simple cases, all the optional information and actions available on a JavaScript-enhanced Web page will have been downloaded when the page was first delivered.

Ajax ("Asynchronous JavaScript and XML") is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications that provide a method whereby parts within a Web page may be updated, using new information obtained over the network at a later time in response to user actions.

This allows the page to be more responsive, interactive and interesting, without the user having to wait for whole-page reloads. Ajax is seen as an important aspect of what is being called Web 2.0. Examples of Ajax techniques currently in use can be seen in Gmail, Google Maps, and other dynamic Web applications.

Publishing Web pages

Web page production is available to individuals outside the mass media. In order to publish a Web page, one does not have to go through a publisher or other media institution, and potential readers could be found in all corners of the globe.

Many different kinds of information are available on the Web, and for those who wish to know other societies, cultures, and peoples, it has become easier.

The increased opportunity to publish materials is observable in the countless personal and social networking pages, as well as sites by families, small shops, etc., facilitated by the emergence of free Web hosting services

WWW prefix in Web addresses

The letters "www" are commonly found at the beginning of Web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide.

This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first Web server was at "nxoc01.cern.ch",^[32] and even today many Web sites exist without a "www" prefix. The "www" prefix has no meaning in the way the main Web site is shown. The "www" prefix is simply one choice for a Web site's host name.

Some Web browsers will automatically try adding "www." to the beginning, and possibly ".com" to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. ll major web browser will also prefix "http://www." and append ".com" to the address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously.

Interface Design Tools

Tools used for designing the interface, development environments for writing code, and toolkits of graphical user interfaces.

Epark

EnhancementPak™ (EPak) is an advanced set of OSF/Motif™ widgets extensively tested in hundreds of large scale commercial software applications.

EPak provides developers with tested, easy-to-use components that eliminate the time, cost, and risk of custom widget development.

Key Features:

Windows95-like controls

Easy to use geometry managers and containers o Data presentation, application

Binary and source code available o No royalties or runtime fees

Converter

At Integrated Computer Solutions we are committed to your success.

That's why we offer several products that will let you migrate from software that does not meet your needs to the state-of-the-art, industry standard that will help you retain the value of your code.

Our code conversion is more than simply translating to UIL, you need to know how to avoid creating more problems than you solve.

BX PRO

Builder Xcessory PRO™ (BX PRO) provides C, C++ or Java developers with everything they need to develop and manage GUI projects of any size from start to finish.

Benefits

Speed GUI developlment

Eliminate unmaintainable code o Quickly implement changes

ICE Interface

ICEfaces is a standards-compliant extension to JavaServer Faces (JSF) for building and deploying rich web applications. ICEfaces™ creates rich user interaction and provides superior presentation characteristics like:

Smooth, incremental page updates with in-place editing and no full page refresh

User context preservation during page update, including scrollbar positioning and user focus

Asynchronous page updates driven from the application in real time

Fine-grained user interaction during form entry that augments the standard submit/response loop

ICEfaces is an industrial strength solution that leverages the JSF application framework and the entire J2EE ecosystem of tools and execution environments. Rich application features are developed in pure Java, and in a pure thin-client model.

There are no Applets, browser plugins, or JavaScript-ladened pages thanks to ICEfaces'   reakthrough Direct-to-DOMTM rendering technology. And because ICEfaces applications are JSF applications, your J2EE and JSF development skills apply directly with no learning curve.