Introduction to E-Commerce
E-Commerce refers to the process of buying or selling a product or service over an electronic network. The most popular medium in which ECommerce is conducted is the Internet.
Microsoft Access
Need to store information about products and customers It is a desktop database software which can store data in Tables We can use it for prototyping our web site Cannot support more than 30 concurrent users Using upsizing tools, we can upgrade database table created in Access to SQL Server Upsizing Tools are available in MS Access 2000 We need to download Upsizing Tools if we are using Microsoft Access 97
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SQL Server Desktop Works with Windows95/98/NT Workstation SQL Server Standard Edition was designed to work with Windows-NT/2000 Server SQL Server Enterprise Edition is an enhanced version of the Standard Edition that supports more memory, more processors and advanced services
ASP Page
It is any file located on our web server that has an extension .ASP This special extension distinguishes an ASP page from a normal HTML file that has an extension .HTM or .HTML When a user requests a normal HTML file, web server simply retrieves the file from the computers hard disk or memory and sends it to the users browser The browser interprets the HTML content of the file and the user sees the web page.
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When someone requests an ASP page, the web server takes more active role Before the file is sent to the users browser, it is first processed by the web server The web server interprets and executes any scripts in an ASP page before sending it to the users browser Active Server Pages contain scripts ASPs contain server-side scripts written in a scripting language such as:
VB Script Java Script Perl Script
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Scripts differ from full-fledged programming languages They have similar syntax of respective language No need to compile an ASP page They are automatically recompiled the next time they are requested Advantage of using scripting language is that it makes it easy to modify a web site even after it has been launched ASP page can be created using any editor such as Notepad, Wordpad, MS-Word etc 12
Even though an ASP page uses a scripting language, it runs faster and it is multithreaded. This allows an ASP page to efficiently support large number of concurrent users. ASPs contain Objects and Components Object is any run-time entity that has methods and properties Component is something that typically has methods, properties and collections Methods determine the actions we can take with the object
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Properties can be read or set to specify the state of the component Collections are sets of key and value pairs related to the component (e.g. page no. & page) ASP includes two types of components:
Built-in objects Installable components
ObjectContext Object
Used with transactional ASPs
Request Object
Represents all information sent from a browser to a server including form variables and query strings
Response Object
Represents all information sent from a server to a browser including HTML content send by an ASP page
Server Object
Enables the use of various utility functions on server
Session Object
Represents information about a particular user session
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Installable components
Ad Rotator Component
Used to display banner advertisements on the web pages of a web site. Using this, we can specify how frequently different banner advertisements should be displayed
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