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 client-server
platform whose technologies included third-and fourth-generation development tools and, later, Visual
Basic and CCC, 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.
