ABSTRACT
Highly functional applications — isn’t this the Holy Grail that information systems managers have been searching for since the 1960s? Historically, we could go back more than a decade to the clientserver platform whose technologies included third-and fourth-generation development tools and, later, Visual Basic and C++, and whose infrastructure included relational database servers in a distributed UNIX environment communicating over TCP/IP. More recent history is built around the Web platform where we find development technologies that include HTML and multimedia authoring tools, Java for developing program objects, and a variety of scripting languages used to glue various systems together.
