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Lesson 11

Communication and Internet Services(Conclusion)

This module discussed terms and concepts used in everyday new media coverage and how they are put to use.
There are several commonly used Internet services that can increase a user's efficiency and capability. This module discussed more about the online community, including, how IRC and other communication services facilitate group discussions. By now you should be able to:
  1. Explain the purpose of HTTP
  2. Define email communication
  3. Explain the purpose of FTP
  4. Describe Telnet
  5. Describe USENET
  6. Describe the role of LISTSERV
  7. Explain how to use Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
  8. Evaluate Web browsers
  9. Explore search engines and best practice techniques for searching

Notion of e-Services

Over the past decade, there have been a number of important advances in computer-based technologies, such as high throughput networks and distributed processing infrastructure capable of supporting a wide collection of underlying protocols and standards, including
  1. (TCP/IP) transmission control protocol/Internet protocol,
  2. (IIOP) Internet inter-object protocol,
  3. (RPC) remote procedure call,
  4. (DCE) distributed computing environment,
  5. (CORBA) Common Request Broker Architecture, and
  6. (RMI)remote method invocation.

These advances have led to many new tools, processes, techniques, and commercial technologies that brought to light a revolutionary concept of assembling software-intensive solutions: component-based development. More and more, we see organizations turning to components as a way to encapsulate critical application functionality for automating business processes within autonomous building blocks that can be easily integrated and deployed in order to build new services to support emerging business processes.


Component-based development

Component-based development has encouraged a "component" view of the Internet as a deployment target for highly autonomous service-oriented systems of all kinds, supporting commercial transactions, information gathering and dissemination, and many forms of specific on-line services. As a consequence of these technology drivers, what a company may expect from IT as a competitive advantage and as a significant asset is quite different now than it was only a few years ago. In fact, evolving views of the Internet as a growing ecosystem of building blocks, and the understanding that these building blocks will become increasingly intelligent services offered commercially by various companies, are having a deep impact on many aspects of business in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It did not take long until a new concept (model) for "commercializing" autonomous service-oriented systems was born, termed e-services. Hewlett- Packard (HP) introduced the concept of "e-services" a couple of years ago, and since then it has been refined and extended by many leading software and hardware vendors with substantial presence in the marketplace, such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

Glossary

In this module, you were introduced to the following terms:
  1. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): HTTP is the underlying communications protocol of the Web and is therefore considered the backbone of the Web.
  2. File Transfer Protocol (FTP): FTP is the primary protocol used to transfer files and resources on the Internet.
  3. Telnet: Telnet is a "terminal emulator for the Internet
  4. Web browser: A client application used to browse, or "interface with," the Internet. Examples of browsers include Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
  5. Search engine: A search engine is a program that searches documents for specific keywords and returns a list of documents in which those words exist. Though really a general class of software, the term search engine is most often used to refer to systems like AltaVista and Google that let users search for documents on the Web.

In the next module, you will learn why security is so important to a succesful Web site.

Using Search Engines - Exercise

Click the Exercise link below to test your mastery of using search engines to search the Net.
Using Search Engines - Exercise

Internet Clients - Quiz

Click the Quiz link below to test your understanding of Internet clients and their uses.
Internet Clients - Quiz