ABSTRACT
The Web technologies eventually evolved to support sophisticated interaction with users, which laid the groundwork for a new paradigm for transacting business. Economists regularly use the terms “new economy” to describe stocks and companies that enable an Internet model of doing business, and “old economy” to describe stocks and companies that sell goods and services in the traditional manner. Computing architectures have been changing rapidly to accommodate the new Web model of doing business. An application server is a relatively new breed of product that allows enterprises to augment their Web servers with new applications that are comprised of new business logic. Enterprises of all sizes began to deploy Web servers for public access over the Internet, employee access over corporate intranets, and business partner access over corporate extranets. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
