e-Commerce and e-Business

The term e-commerce and e-business have become almost as pervasive as the use of Internet. The "e" stands for electronic and is used to separate the traditional use of terms like commerce, business, and mail from the corresponding computer or Internet-based usage of these terms.

What exactly do e-commerce and e-business mean? e-commerce is about selling products and services over the Internet in a secure environment and is a subset of e-business. e-business is about using Internet technologies to transform key business processes to capitalize on new business opportunities, strengthen relationships in the supply chain with customers, suppliers, business partners, and distributors, and become more efficient and in the process more profitable.

The Internet, intranets, and extranets serve as the enabling e-business and e-commerce technologies. You will learn about this in later chapters.

Internet Protocols

The Internet is inherently a multivendor computing environment composed of computers from many manufacturers using various network devices, operating systems, languages, platforms, and software programs. In order for this diverse array of hardware and software components to interoperate (or connect and work) with each other, there must be a standard method or language of communication. This language is referred to as a protocol.

The Internet is based on scores of protocols that support each of the types of services and technologies deployed on the Internet. The basic suite of protocols that allows this mix of hardware and software devices to work together is called TCP/IP.

TCP/IP

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. TCP/IP became the Internet's standard data transfer protocol in 1982 and is the common protocol (or language) that allows communication between different hardware platforms, operating systems, and software applications. TCP/IP is a packet switching system that encapsulates data transferred over the Internet into digital "packets."

It is important to understand that clients, servers, and network devices on the Internet must be running the TCP/IP protocol. This is true for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX computer platforms.

On a Windows-based client, the TCP/IP protocol is implemented through a software device driver sometimes referred to as the TCP/IP "stack." In Windows 95/98 and Windows NT, the TCP/IP stack is built into the operating system.

HTTP

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. The HTTP protocol operates together with the TCP/IP protocol to facilitate the transfer of data in the form of text, images, audio, video, and animation.

Internet Services

The Internet is a combination of many types of services, and each has it own associated protocol. It has evolved from a time when only text-based files and e-mail could be transferred from one computer to another. The most common Internet services are:

e-mail-Based on Post Office Protocol (POP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
File Transfer-Based on the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and is used to transfer ASCII and binary files across a TCP/IP network
Newsgroups-Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is used for newsgroups.
World Wide Web-HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used for the Web.
Other Internet services include Telnet, IRC Chat, Archie, and Gopher.
- Most of these services are available using the Web and e-mail.

While each of these services is layered on top of the TCP/IP protocol, they are entirely separate. Originally, these services were isolated from each other. To download a file, you needed a dedicated FTP application. To send or receive e-mail, you needed a dedicated e-mail application. As the Internet and the Web have evolved, these capabilities have been integrated into Web browsers. This eliminates the need for dedicated client applications. Figure 1-2 illustrates the types of services that are currently supported by Web browsers.

Figure 1-2: Multiple Internet services available via the Web

URL Components and Functions

Ill.1-2

A URL is a unique address on the Internet, similar to an e-mail address. A URL specifies the address of a server, or a specific Web page residing on a server on the Internet.

A URL also specifies the transfer protocol.

The transfer protocol is the method of transferring or downloading information into a browser such as HTTP (for Web pages), FTP (for files), or NNTP (for USENET news).
The domain name specifies the address of a specific Web server to which the browser is connecting. Similar to a telephone number, it must be unique.
The directory path is the name and directory path of the file on the server being requested by the browser (optional).
The filename is the name of the Web page being requested by the browser.

Types of URLs

As explained in the preceding section, URLs vary with respect the selected transfer protocol. The transfer protocol is the method by which information is transferred across the Internet. The transfer protocol determines the type of server being connected to, be it a Web, FTP, Gopher, mail, or news server. Table 1-1 lists the major transfer protocols.

Transfer Protocol	Server Type	URL Syntax
http	Web	http://www.location.com
ftp	FTP	ftp://ftp.location.com
gopher	Gopher	gopher://gopher.location.com
news	Newsgroup	news://news.location.com
mail	e-mail	mailto://person@location.com
file	Local drive	file:///c:/directory/filename.htm