Distributed Computing Applications and
Infrastructure (IS 206)
Fall 1998
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Milestone 4
Development Justification
The vast expansion of the World Wide Web makes Global Web Developer a software
suite with incredible growth potential. The WWW has over 4.5 million domains registered
worldwide and a growth rate of more than one hundred thousand domains a week (source).
Within these huge numbers are thousands of corporate and non-profit websites which
compose the market GWD targets. Without a doubt, the lack of any other product
offering the breadth and depth of functionality provided in GWD coupled with the
amazing growth of this market justifies the development of this application as
a software product. There is a real need for this functionality and GWD will be
the first application suite on the market capable of meeting it.
Required Configurability and Flexibility
In order to maximize the potential market for GWD, the product must be sufficiently
configurable and flexible to meet the needs of a broad range of customers. The
application has many valuable features, but the same configuration and implementation
of GWD will not be appropriate for all or even most customers. They will want
the capability to tailor GWD's installation to their organization's needs and
requirements, which will often be rather unique. Furthermore, customers will want
an application which grows as they do. The most important considerations to enable
such customization and growth are enumerated below:
Modular configuration - In conjunction with GWD's planned software framework,
installation and configuration will be modular. The overall application is composed
of several components which can be individually installed and configured as desired.
If certain features of a module are not installed, they can easily be added at
a later time. The modular organization of this process permits customers to customize
the application for their purposes. This modular configuration will allow for
ease of upgrade in the future as well.
Server scalability - Depending on the size and distribution of an organization's
resources, a customer will require different numbers, locations and configurations
of servers running the application in a distributed manner. Besides the initial
installation, however, server scalability will be important to customers as their
websites grow and their organization expands into new geographic locations. An
array of server configurations must be supported to match GWD's performance to
the needs of the organization. Customers should be able to add and drop servers
as needed--without headaches.
Site scalability - In keeping with the modular paradigm of development
and configuration, GWD must possess scaling support for website size and traffic.
This requirement is closely coupled to the need for server scalability. However,
site scalability includes several unique factors not so closely linked to servers.
Site functions such as traffic monitoring and processing, as well as link management
and suggestion, must be able to keep pace with tremendous growth in traffic and
links. Users should not notice significant performance degradation as the volume
of web content and traffic continually grows.
Legacy data support - The vast majority of customers are certain to have
"legacy" web content that they do not want to abandon. GWD will be able
to accommodate these pre-existing websites by acquiring such content from the
old servers and processing the data for use within GWD. Legacy content is converted
to the new environment automatically instead of requiring painstaking copying
and processing by hand. GWD sweeps an existing site and captures all the data
it needs.
Multiple O/S support - Although the web browser interface to GWD is platform-independent,
the back end software has to be implemented differently for each operating system
environment. While initial development would most likely be for Windows NT,
a substantial segment of potential customers may be interested in running a UNIX-compatible
version of GWD. This possibility should be further investigated and pursued if
sufficient demand is perceived.
Role of HTML and XML
HTML, and the emerging XML standard, play central roles in GWD. Currently,
HTML is the basis for all conventional web page design. Therefore, the fundamental
role of HTML in Global Web Developer is quite obvious. HTML lies beneath all the
pages developed using GWD. However, it is also the code which defines the standard
interface for its use because the interface for GWD is the web browser.
Despite the significance of HTML in GWD, another acronym critical to GWD's continued
success will be XML. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a new and evolving standard
for defining platform independent content similar to HTML, though it promises
to be much more powerful and impressive. While it is not entirely realistic at
this point to provide full support for XML, primarily because it is still undergoing
development, the design of GWD must take into account the reality that XML will
almost certainly supplant HTML eventually. Therefore, the software design of GWD
must permit future expansion to include full support for XML. Careful object-oriented
design should make this process as seemless as possible. Given the expectation
that XML will replace HTML, the development team for GWD should definitely join
the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for defining the XML standard,
and become involved in the details of XML's implementation. Additionally, consideration
of XML in this way means that GWD customers can be assured that as soon as XML
becomes a reasonable format for development, GWD will support it.
last updated 11/09/98
