IT has revolutionized the world today because of higher-volume data processing, and higher speed of data transmission. Some of the immediate benefits of IT to people are: being able to view information over the Internet which has been posted by a user millions of miles away, and being able to perform computations of great complexity within milliseconds.
The following are some aspects of important technologies that make up our IT world.
Networks:
There are two important types of networks, LAN and WAN. LAN connects all computers within a 5 meter radius, and WAN connects all computers across the GLOBE by transmitting through satellite receivers. The data which get transmitted across a WAN or a LAN are packet data, and the transmission technology is called Packet Switching Technology. The protocol used for Transmission is called TCP/ IP
Internet:
Internet is built of foundation classes of Packet Transmission provided by WAN. While e-mail technology just carries the data over a network, Internet does more than that by storing records entered by the users in a database or XML format, and providing the data on request to the user in a browser using a Search Engine.
When a user enters a URL in a browser such as IE (or other browsers such as Mozilla, Netscape etc.), the request is sent to the Web server. The Web Server is a machine which holds the files that are to be transmitted to the browser. The files are kept in a virtual directory of the web server such as Internet Information Server (Microsoft) or TomCat (Sun).
Different technologies provide for web-site building. The popular ones are Microsofts’ Active Server Pages, DOT NET and Sun Microsystems Java. When the web-server encounters a URL, it sends the page requested to the browser. For experimental purposes, if you just type a URL address and go to View/ Source in your browser, you would be able to see scripting which is used to compose the page. The scripting would contain an HTML section (used for formatting the page) and a scripting section which fetches data from the server. For example, in the case of displaying data from a database, the database would not be present in the users’ machine, but be present in the web server. The request for transmitting this data to the browser is sent by the scripting component which uses SQL / ODBC/ ADO to flush the data to the browser. XML is another popular medium for transmitting and storing datakept in a remote location.
E-Mail Technology:
An e-mail works on the foundation classes of File Transfer and Remote Login such as Telnet. An e-mail client such as Hotmail uses services such as SMTP and POP to send and receive e-mails. SMTP is a protocol used for sending e-mail data. SMTP is wrapped around Telnet and invokes port 25 of a computer to transmit packet data. In fact, SMTP and POP services were known in academia as early as 1980s, but Hotmail became a commercial success in the mid 90s because of the popularity of the Internet and the public usage of the Internet.
Application Technology:
An application can be stand-alone and work only on a PC, or can work in a server – client mode, or on an Internet mode. An application is character- or GUI-based and provides a good presentation layer for a user to view information or enter data. A client – server application keeps only one copy of the application in, say, binary format in the server computer. Many users can concurrently use the same application from a client computer. A client just provides a copy of the application to the user.
Database Technology:
A database is a normalized set of data. There are five levels of normalization. Most vendors today offer products, which fit into the Third Normal form of data normalization. Normalization eliminates data redundancy and functionally decomposes chaotic data into smaller units with relations. It is not enough to just store the data in a normal form. SQL is used to enter / retrieve the data from the database. Some popular commercial databases are- ACCESS, ORACLE, MS-SQLSERVER, INFORMIX, SYBASE, etc. Database technology has evolved into providing real-time retrieval speed for very large databases. Also, in a multi-user environment, the database technology is equipped to handle concurrent requests by locking internal data from conflicting user actions.
Data-Warehousing:
Whereas database technology presented a user with a storage / retrieval mechanismof data, it also confounded the end users because of the sheer number of commercial databases and MIS deployed inside an organization. Data-warehousing technologies provided a platform to integrate many data sources into a single data repository providing for MIS over the Intranet or the Internet. DWH also investigated many other important issues from the perspective of usability of information, such as retrieval of queries at good speed. Some commercially successful DWHs are Informatica and BRIO.
Author: Srinivasa Gopal
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Import duty tariff
Related posts:
