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Chapter 2 – Review of Literature and Research
Overview of all literature and research sources:
Introduction:
Woojung Suh, author of the book Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques,
states that “since the advent of the Web, every aspect of our lives and organizational
activities has changed dramatically” (p. vi). The World Wide Web has become
extremely important and has had a significant impact in business where the use of Web
technologies has rapidly increased (Standing, 2002; Suh 2005). Many businesses view
Web technologies as a vital tool in their day-to-day operations and they have made every
effort to expand the development, use and maintenance of Web-based applications (Suh
2005). Expanding on Suh’s view of Web technologies, John Artz (1996) believes that
corporate Web applications, specifically those using multimedia hypertext software based
on the TCP/IP protocol suite, provide corporations easy access to a multitude of
“corporate information resources for internal and external users on a wide variety of
platforms in geographically distributed locations” (p. 64).
Web Application Technologies:
Web applications are built using a number of different technologies that work
with each other to produce the desired product. Hassan and Holt (2005), along with
Westman (2002), advocate that Web applications are not just made up of static hyper-text
markup language (HTML) pages but also include dynamic pages. Suh (2005) expands on
this idea defining a Web application as “any application program that runs on the Internet
or corporate intranets and extranets” (p. 77). Moreover, Suh (2005) suggests three types