ABSTRACT
Highly functional applications-isn’t this the Holy Grail
that information systemsmanagers 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 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 multi-
media authoring tools, Java for developing program
objects, and a variety of scripting languages used to glue
various systems together.
