DAV SCHOOL OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT, BBSR

SUBJECT : E-Business
BBA 6th semester
Unit-2

Syllabus: Internet and WWW, Basic Network Architecture, WEB system

Architecture, URL, Overview of the HTTP.

Important questions
Q1. What is Network Architecture in e- Business?
Q2. What is Internet? Explain its Characteristics & uses.
Q3. What is Internet? Explain its advantages & limitations.
Q4. Write short notes on i) URL
ii) HTTP
iii) WWW

INTERNET
The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism
for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction
between individuals through computers irrespective of geographic locations.
It is a global network of computers that allows people to send email, view
web sites, download files such as.mp3 and images, chat, post messages on
newsgroups and forums and much more.
Characteristics of Internet
All systems and network are logically linked together by a globally unique address
space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions.
1. Complete network is able to support communications using the Transmission
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent
extensions/ follow-on's, and/or other IP-compatible protocols.
2. It provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level
services layered on the communications and related infrastructure
described herein
USES OF INTERNET
In the modern life internet has a basic requirement for better life. The uses of
internet in the daily life are discussed as follows:
1. E-mail: E-mail is now an essential communication tool in daily life and
business. The advantage to email is that it is free (no charge per use) when
compared to other communication tools like telephone, fax and postal services.
2. Information: In the modern times a there is a huge amount of information
available on the internet for every subject known to man, ranging from government
law and services, trade fairs and conferences, market information, new ideas and
technical support.
3. Services: In present time many service provider are working on internet and
provided their services on internet some examples are online banking, job seeking
and applications, and hotel reservations.

4.Buy or sell products: In present time purchasing and selling activities gaining
very fast momentum on the internet. The internet is a recognized very effective way
to buy and sell products all over the world. Amazon.com, flipcart.com, quiker.com, is
some examples of the buy and sell website working in India.
5. Communities: Communities of all types have sprung up on the internet. It
is a great way to meet up with people of similar interest and discuss common
issues. Face book, twitter, Google hangout are some popular examples for the
communities on internet.
6. Improved Customer Service: With the use of internet companies are
available to their customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Internet never
sleeps.
7. Market Expansion: Every web page on internet available on world wide
and any one can see the information given on the web page of the company. The
Internet is a global system. Therefore it is very useful in market expansion of the
company.
8.Low Cost Marketing: Internet is also working as a low cost marketing tool
for the business houses. With the use of internet and computer companies are able
to developing a full color brochure without having to incur the costs of proofs,
printers, wasted paper, long lead times between revisions, and more.
9.Low Cost Selling: Internet is also working as a low cost selling tool for the
business houses. With the use of internet companies are able to sell their product
at very low cost. Without the cost of direct selling potential customers can get
detailed information about your products or services at any time
10.Lower Communication Costs: Internet helps the company for reducing the
communication cost of the company. Company's time, and their employee's time,
is valuable in business.
 11.Value Added Marketing: Companies can use their Web page to provide
useful information about the particular industry, product or uses.

ADVANTAGES OF INTERNET
The Internet has proven to be very useful and has come with lots of advantages.
The advantages of the Internet are discussed as follows:
1. Unlimited Communication: The Internet has made it easy for business to
communicate with customer and others because it is cheap and convenient. The
only costs incurred are those paid to the Internet service provider. If you want to
talk to someone who is in another part of the globe, you can just fire up Skype or
any other communication app and hold a video chat.
2. Plentiful Information and Resources: The Internet is flourished with
information of all fields of life, research academics, business etc. For access the
information on internet there are multiple search engines like Google are available.
For example, it is now common for people to look for free advice from the
Internet on all sorts of issues
3. Easy Sharing: With the use of Internet, sharing information is fast and
seamless. If a company wants to share the feature of their latest product, company
can do so in an instant by updating the web page and posting on social media sites
such as Face book or Twitter.
4. Online Services and E-commerce: The growth of e commerce and
online services is comes with us as an extension of Internet facility. Today with
the use of Internet it is possible to carry out financial transactions online. Company
and people can transfer funds, pay taxes and utility bills or book movie tickets
over the Internet at any time and with their comfort.
5. Entertainment: Entertainment is one of the major reasons for many
people surfing on the Internet. People can watch movies; listen to music, read
their favorite celebrity gossip columns and play games over the Internet.

DISADVANTAGES OF THE INTERNET

Apart of the above mention advantages internet have disadvantage also. The
disadvantages of the internet are discussed as follows:
1. Spam Mail: Spam mail is the most disturbing feature of internet.
Spamming is the sending of unwanted and useless emails to random
people. These emails obstruct the recipient needlessly. They are illegal
and can cause frustration because they make it hard for people to access
their email accounts.
 2. Virus, Trojan &Other Malware: Virus, Trojan and other malware are
malicious programs that plague the Internet time and again. They attack any
computer with the sole intent of disturb-the functionality of the computer. This can
be very costly if you lose important data. Internet viruses can be categorized to
following three types:

(1) Those that, harm your executable boot- files and system.
(ii) Those that affect a specific file by destroying it.
(iii) Those that keep changing things in your computer like Word files.
A computer can be protected by installing a reliable anti-virus program in the
computer before accessing the Internet.
3.Fraudulent activity: An important disadvantage of the internet is fraudulent
activity on internet. It is a well known fact that the Internet has become a
market place has also seen a rise in fraud cases. Credit/debit card details are
particularly vulnerable.
4. Addiction to Internet: Just like everything else, people also get addicted to
the Internet. This may sound strange, but 'some people spend more than their fair
amount of time on the Internet. This affects their social relations and caused health
problem also. Internet addiction has been known to be a major cause of obesity
and has, in some cases, led to some diseases like carpal tunnel syndrome.
5.Kids Exposed to Adults-Only Content: It is a well known fact that Internet
has all types of information available that could ever need is both a good and a
bad thing. This is because it contains age-inappropriate content like
pornography.
WWW

WWW stands for World Wide Web. It is defined as all the resources and users
on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
A broader definition comes from the organization that Web inventor Tim
Berners-Lee helped found, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an
embodiment of human knowledge.
In simple terms, The World Wide Web is a way of exchanging information
between computers on the Internet, tying them together into a vast collection of
interactive multimedia resources.
Internet and Web is not the same thing: Web uses internet to pass over the
information.
Evolution
World Wide Web was created by Timothy Berners Lee in 1989 at CERN in
Geneva. World Wide Web came into existence as a proposal by him, to allow
researchers to work together effectively and efficiently at CERN. Eventually it
became World Wide Web.

The

following diagram briefly defines evolution of World Wide We

WWW Architecture
WWW architecture is divided into several layers as shown in the following
diagram:
WWW Operation
WWW works on client- server approach. Following steps explains how the web
works:
1. User enters the URL (say, http://www.tutorialspoint.com) of the web
page in the address bar of web browser.
2. Then browser requests the Domain Name Server for the IP address
corresponding to www.tutorialspoint.com.
3. After receiving IP address, browser sends the request for web page to the
web server using HTTP protocol which specifies the way the browser and
web server communicates.
4. Then web server receives request using HTTP protocol and checks its
search for the requested web page. If found it returns it back to the web
browser and close the HTTP connection.
5. Now the web browser receives the web page, It interprets it and display the
contents of web page in web browser’s window.

What is Network Architecture in e- Business.

 Basic Network Architecture
 The Web physically consists of our personal computer, web browser
software, a connection to an Internet service provider computers, called
servers that host digital data, and routers and switches to direct the flow of
information.
 The Web is known as a client-server system. Your computer is the client;
the remote computers that store electronic files are the servers.

Client server system Architecture

Client
In client/server architecture, client is a computer or process that request from a
server. It is often an application that uses a graphical user interface. Each instance
of the client software can send requests to a server.
Characteristics of a client:
In client/server architecture client is an active (master) computer or process.
Client sends requests to server.
Client waits for and receives server replies.
 Types of client
 Clients are generally classified in these types:
  1. Fat clients
 2. Thin clients
 3. Hybrid clients
Fat clients: A fat client is also known as a thick client or rich client. It
is a client
 that performs the bulk of any data processing operations itself, and does
not necessarily rely on the server.
 The fat client is most common in the form of a personal computer, since
the PC or laptops can operate independently.
 Thin clients : A thin client is a minimal sort of client. Thin clients use
the resources of the host computer.
A thin client's job is generally just to graphically display pictures
provided by an application server, which performs the bulk of any
required data processing.
 Hybrid clients : A hybrid client is also called a smart client. It is a
mixture of the above. Similar to fat client, it is processes locally, but rely
on the server for the storage.
This relatively new approach offers features from both the fat client
(multimedia support, high performance) and the thin client (high
manageability, flexibility).

Server

 In client/server architecture, a server is simply a computer that is running

software that enables it to serve specific requests from other computers,
called "clients.“
 For example, you can set up a file server that becomes a central storage
place for your network, a print server that takes in print jobs and ships them
off to a printer, as well as a multitude of other servers and server functions.
Characteristics of a server:
 In client/server architecture server is a passive (slave) computer or process.
 Server waits for requests.
 Upon receipt of requests, server processes them and then replies. A server
provides many benefits including:
 Optimization : server hardware is designed to serve requests from clients
quickly
 Centralization : files are in one location for easy administration
 Security : multiple levels of permissions can prevent users from doing
damage to files.
  Redundancy and Back-up : data can be stored in redundant ways making
for quick restore in case of problems

URL

Every document on the Web has a unique address. This address is known as
Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
Several HTML/XHTML tags include a URL attribute value, including hyperlinks,
inline images, and forms. All of them use the same syntax to specify the location of
a web resource, regardless of the type or content of that resource. That's why it is
known a Uniform Resource Locator.
URL Elements
A URL is made of up several parts, each of which offers information to the web
browser to help find the page. It is easier to learn the parts of a URL, if you look at
the example URL given below, there are three key parts: the scheme, the host
address, and the file path.
The following section will discuss each of them:
http://www.dsbm8.org/index.html
The Scheme
The scheme identifies the type of protocol and URL you are linking to and
therefore, how the resource should be retrieved. For example, most web browsers
use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to pass information to communicate with
the web servers and this is the reason a URL starts with http://.
There are other schemes available and you can use either of them based on your
requirement:
Serial .NoScheme & Description
1.http://
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to request pages from Web servers
and send them back from Web servers to browsers.
2.https://
Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) encrypts the data sent between the
browser and the Web server using a digital certificate.
3.ftp://
File Transfer Protocol is another method for transferring files on the Web. While
HTTP is a lot more popular for viewing Web sites because of its integration with
browsers, FTP is still commonly used protocol to transfer large files across the
Web and to upload source files to your Web server.
4.file://
Used to indicate that a file is on the local hard disk or a shared directory on a LAN.
The Host Address
The host address is where a website can be found, either the IP address (four sets
of numbers between 0 and 255, for example 68.178.157.132 ) or more commonly
the domain name for a site such as www.tutorialspoint.com. Note that "www" is
not actually part of the domain name although it is often used in the host address.
The File Path
The file path always begins with a forward slash character, and may consist of one
or more directory or folder names. Each directory name is separated by forward
slash characters and the file path may end with a filename at the end. Here
index.htm is the filename which is available in html directory:
http://www.dsbm8.org/index.html
Other Parts of the URL
Using credentials is a way of specifying a username and password for a password-
protected part of a site. The credentials come before the host address, and they are
separated from the host address by an @ sign. Note how the username is separated
from the password by a colon. The following URL shows the username admin and
the password admin123:
https://admin:admin123@dsbm8.org/admin/index.htm
Using the above URL, you can authenticate administrator and if provided ID and
Password are correct then administrator will have access on index.htm file
available in admin directory.
You can use a telnet URL to connect to a server as follows :
telnet://user:password@ dsbm8.org:port/
Another important information is Web Server Port Number. By default HTTP
Server runs on port number 80. But if you are running a server on any other port
number then it can be porvided as follows, assuming server is running on port
8080:
https://www.dsbm8.org:8080/index.htm
Fragment identifiers can be used after a filename to indicate a specific part of the
page that a browser should go immediately. Following is an example to reach to
the top of page html_text_links.htm.
https://www. dsbm8.org /html/html_text_links.htm#top
You can pass some information to the server using URL. When you use a form on
a webpage, such as a search form or an online order form, the browser can append
the information you supply to the URL to pass information from your browser to
the server as follows −
https://www. dsbm8.org /cgi-bin/search.cgi?searchTerm=HTML
Here, searchTerm=HTML is passed to the server where search.cgi script is used to
parse this passed information and take further action.
Absolute and Relative URLs
A URL may be addressed in one of the following two ways:
Absolute − An absolute URL is the complete address of a resource. For example
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/html/html_text_links.htm
Relative − A relative URL indicates where the resource is in relation to the current
page. Given URL is added with the <base> element to form a complete URL. For
example /html/html_text_links.htm
Reserved and Unsafe Characters
Reserved characters are those have a specific meaning within the URL. For
example, the slash character separates elements of a pathname within a URL. If
you need to include a slash in a URL that is not intended to be an element separator
then you need to encode it as %2F:
Unsafe characters are those have no special meaning within the URL but may have
a special meaning in the context the URL is written. For example, double quotes
("") delimit URL attribute values in tags. If you need to include a double quotation
mark directly in a URL, you would probably confuse the browser. Instead, you
should encode the double quotation mark to avoid any possible conflict.

1) The Protocol in use – in this case: HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

There are also other protocols like HTTPS, FTP and so on.
2) The Host or Hostname: www.youtube.com
3)The Subdomain: www.
4)The domain name (Domain): youtube.com
5)The Top-Level-Domain (a web-address suffix): .com
(also known by the shorthand TLD)
6)The Path: /watch
A path will usually refer to a file or folder (directory) on the
webserver (for example “/folder/file.html”)
7)Parameter and value: v (Parameter), QhcwLyyEjOA (Parameter value)
Parameters are initialised by the “?” inside the URL.
In our example, the parameter name is “v” and its value is “QhcwLyyEjOA”
(Parameter name and Parameter value always have the same structure:
Parametername=Parametervalue)

HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for
distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. This is the foundation
for data communication for the World Wide Web (i.e. internet) since 1990.
HTTP is a generic and stateless protocol which can be used for other purposes as
well using extensions of its request methods, error codes, and headers.
Basic Features
There are three basic features that make HTTP a simple but powerful protocol:

HTTP is connectionless: The HTTP client, i.e., a browser initiates an HTTP

request and after a request is made, the client waits for the response. The server
processes the request and sends a response back after which client disconnect the
connection. So client and server knows about each other during current request and
response only. Further requests are made on new connection like client and server
are new to each other.
HTTP is media independent: It means, any type of data can be sent by HTTP as
long as both the client and the server know how to handle the data content. It is
required for the client as well as the server to specify the content type using
appropriate MIME-type.
HTTP is stateless: As mentioned above, HTTP is connectionless and it is a direct
result of HTTP being a stateless protocol. The server and client are aware of each
other only during a current request. Afterwards, both of them forget about each
other. Due to this nature of the protocol, neither the client nor the browser can
retain information between different requests across the web pages.
HTTP/1.0 uses a new connection for each request/response exchange, where as
HTTP/1.1 connection may be used for one or more request/response exchanges.
Basic Architecture
The following diagram shows a very basic architecture of a web application and

depicts where HTTP sits:

HTTP Architecture
The HTTP protocol is a request/response protocol based on the client/server based
architecture where web browsers, robots and search engines, etc. act like HTTP
clients, and the Web server acts as a server.
Client
The HTTP client sends a request to the server in the form of a request method,
URI, and protocol version, followed by a MIME-like message containing request
modifiers, client information, and possible body content over a TCP/IP connection.
Server
The HTTP server responds with a status line, including the message's protocol
version and a success or error code, followed by a MIME-like message containing
server information, entity meta information, and possible entity-body content.
HTTP Version
HTTP uses a <major>.<minor> numbering scheme to indicate versions of the
protocol. The version of an HTTP message is indicated by an HTTP-Version field
in the first line. Here is the general syntax of specifying HTTP version number:
HTTP-Version = "HTTP" "/" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
Example
HTTP/1.0 Or HTTP/1.1