Is an application that allows you to search for content on the Web and displays multiple web pages based on the content or a word you have typed?

Consider the Source

Web-based applications are typically used through web browsers. Each browser is slightly different and displays web pages in different ways. As a result, programming of web-based applications needs to be specialized to accommodate the ways that browsers interact with different web languages, such as HTML, XML, Flash, Perl, ASP, and PHP. This variability in browsers, along with the likelihood of their use by potential users, must be considered when designing web-based applications. To address this issue and maximize exposure for a consumer-based application, open source code can be used to develop a web-based application.

2.6.2 Web-based applications

A web-based application differs from a more traditional client-server application, primarily in the presentation and application logic pieces:

The presentation component still runs on the user workstation, but a browser, for example, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, instead of a specialized program provided by the vendor is used as the presentation tool.

The application logic executes on the web server instead of on the user’s workstation.

The storage component typically doesn’t change much. It continues to run on a server dedicated to providing the database functionality.

Supporting a web-based application can be much more challenging than supporting a client-server application. The primary reasons for this is that the combined environment is more complicated that a traditional environment:

More pieces of software are involved; for example, plug-ins, HTML, and Java script run behind the scenes to allow the application to function. Unless you’re extremely familiar with the application you won’t be aware of all the pieces involved.

Many of these pieces are outside your control. For example, you have little control over what browser or version of browser each user has on their desktop. You can tell users over and over that application XYZ is only certified for Internet Explorer 9, but I guarantee you that you’ll have complaints from users that the application isn’t working on their computers. After you investigate it you’ll determine that they’re using Internet Explorer 10 or Opera or another unsupported server.

Network throughput is vital. If the network is disrupted or slowed down significantly, then the application will get very sluggish, very quickly. I will advise you that the chances of the problem being the network are fairly slim. It’s very easy to blame unknown performance issues on the network, but most of the time, it turns out to be something else. Be sure you have some proof before blaming the network. Chapter 24—“UNIX Tools” provides information on tools that you can use to determine if a problem is or isn’t being caused by network issues.

Users employ a wide variety of computers, operating systems, and Internet browsers. All of these combinations, along with the various options for configurations of settings of the O/S and browser, make it difficult to pin down exactly what the cause of a problem is.

Firewall and port issues can be frustrating because something that worked yesterday might be failing today. Maintaining all of the rules in a firewall isn’t easy and periodically that team will make a mistake and your application might be impacted. Chapter 15 provides information on tools that can be used to identify what firewall ports are open.

Overall is it harder or easier to support a web-based application than a client-server application? It’s difficult to answer that question broadly. A lot of it depends on the applications themselves. Some are difficult to support, while others are significantly easier to work with.

Some things are easier under a web-based application and some things are more difficult. Bringing up a new user is easier because you don’t have to load software onto his or her PC. Typically, you just have to add their account to the application and give them the URL to go to within their web browser.

On the other hand, troubleshooting access or performance problems can be more difficult due to the larger number of components and interconnections. Here are just a few possible causes that you’ll have to investigate. Some of these causes apply to both client-server and web-based applications:

Is the user entering the correct URL into the web browser?

Is he or she using a supported browser?

Does the user have an account in the application?

Is the user correctly entering their ID and password?

Is the user’s application account enabled?

Is the user’s network account in Active Directory enabled?

Is the firewall port between the user and the web server open?

Is the DNS name being resolved correctly?

Is the web server having resource issues, i.e., disk space, memory, database connections?

Are the application’s services running on the web server?

Is the load balancer on the web server running correctly?

Is the firewall port open between the web server and the database server?

Is the database server up?

Has the application’s account on the database server expired?

Is the database software running on the database server?

Has the database server run out of resources, e.g., disk space or memory?

The Benefits of Web-Based Applications and Current Adoption Rates

Companies adopt web-based applications to improve communication and workflow within their businesses and improve their relationships with clients. A June 2012 McKinsey global survey of over 3,500 executives showed that 83 percent had adopted at least one social technology, with 90 percent of those respondents reporting “measureable benefits” from the use of those technologies.4 Established resources, such as the E2 Conference, are available to help companies leverage the benefits of new technology in their businesses (www.e2conf.com).

When the Web 2.0 concept really began to take hold in 2006 and 2007, corporations tentatively dipped their toes into the social media sphere by instituting company blogs to help them communicate with customers and employees. Early adopters included Wells Fargo,5 GM, and Sun Microsystems.6 Blogs provided the sense of a more direct line of communication with corporate executives, adding to perceptions of customer service and employee care. They also gave companies a new method of collecting and responding to valuable customer and employee feedback, as well as a way to share information from the top down.

Then arrived the behemoths: Facebook and Twitter. These two social media platforms in particular have revolutionized social media, quickly surpassing the use of blogs. According to the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which conducts an annual survey7 on the adoption of social media across Fortune 500 companies, 28 percent of companies surveyed in 2012 maintained a corporate blog. In comparison, 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a corporate Twitter account, and 66 percent had a company Facebook page. More recently, the same researchers have found that among Inc. 500 companies (the fastest-growing private companies in America, defined annually by Inc. magazine), 81 percent were using LinkedIn in 2012—exceeding both Facebook and Twitter use.8

One of the first collaborative creation tools to emerge was wikis. According to Bill Ives, Novell first used wikis for team collaboration in projects like requirements generation, documentation, and bug fixes.9 Wikis allow employees to collaboratively edit documents and processes in real time, without the bother of emailing, uploading, or downloading previous versions. Similarly, Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar, and Drive allow business users to easily collaborate, communicate, and stay organized. As Inc. magazine reported, “the applications that Google has built for business productivity make folders and filing no longer an important part of business. It’s all part of doing business on the cloud.”10

Web applications within social media sites

A problem with web-based applications such as social media sites, e.g. Facebook, is the availability of other applications that users can install, which allow users to run third-party applications such as games, and functionality to personalize their page. This grants the application access to all a user’s personal information, irrespective of any privacy setting made in the social media site (Thomas, Grier, and Nicol, 2010). The vast majority of these applications only need basic personal details of a user. Furthermore, anyone can write an application, so some applications have no security controls. Worse still, an application could have been developed by a cyber criminal.

What is Web 2.0?

The introduction of web-based applications to the business world began nearly a decade ago with the concept of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 doesn’t encompass a set of new technologies, but is simply a revolution in the way existing technologies are used: It is a philosophy of open online communication that is often interactive and user-driven. According to founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., Tim O’Reilly, who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0 in 2004, Web 2.0 is a category of applications that meet the following seven criteria:

1.

They use the web as a platform;

They harness collective intelligence (they include content from users and other sites through tagging, permalinks, RSS, etc.);

They are backed by specialized databases (such as Google’s web crawl and Amazon’s product database);

They are delivered as services, not products;

They support lightweight programming models;

They are not limited to use on a single device;

They offer rich user experiences.1

According to this definition, then, wikis, blogs, mashups, online document creation and collaboration, social media, and video and photo sharing are all considered Web 2.0 technologies. The features of Web 2.0 are exemplified in sites such as Google, Amazon, YouTube, and Wikipedia, and are now inseparable from all web-based applications available today.

Web-based editors

These editors are Web-based applications, mostly using technologies based in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) — which, like GoogleDocs, are capable of managing word-processing tasks within a browser window. This type of editor is promising, especially considering the advances in cloud computing, but we must also consider problems such as privacy, security, autonomy, and traceability. A popular application that uses this approach is the Authoring Tool for Amendments (AT4AM), developed in 2010 by the European Parliament. AT4AM (Fabiani, 2011) allows Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to write and send amendments to any European Commission proposal through the Web using any browser. Since amendments are usually short and limited texts, regulated by rigorous procedures and following a set of fixed linguistic constraints, the Web editor proved to be an appropriate solution, much better than the previous one, which was based on hand-filled templates in MS Word, printed out and delivered on paper to the drafting offices.

AM4EP uses the Akoma Ntoso schema and enables all MEPs to see and edit Commission proposals directly onto the original text. The user thus sees the wording of the proposal as it should read if the amendment was accepted, and the tool automatically generates the amendment as a set of editing instructions as expected by the offices. Currently 70% of the amendments of the European Parliament are submitted using this tool and the editor was awarded European Parliament Best Tool for 2010 (Figure 9.8).

Problem

In many community-based web applications, it's important that users feel comfortable interacting or transacting with others with whom they have no prior experience. In addition, given the available options, users may need some indicators to identify the trustworthiness or expertise of people who are offering suggestions, solutions, or products. Some common scenarios are choosing a seller from whom to purchase an item (e.g., eBay, Amazon Marketplace, NexTag), choosing a book to buy (e.g, Amazon), choosing a movie to rent (e.g., Netflix), choosing a restaurant to visit (e.g., Yelp), trusting a suggestion or an answer offered by a person (e.g., Yahoo! Answers), and so forth.

6.7 Chapter summary

•

Testing of enterprise web-based applications keeps the end user as its primary focus while devising testing strategies.

The main challenges in enterprise web testing are related to performance, usability, security, and others.

The UCAPP testing model relies on these key tenets: user-centric testing, complete validation, automated testing, proactive problem detection and prevention, and performance focus.

User-centric testing tries to test all end-user scenarios through usability testing, A/B testing, load testing, experience testing, and user satisfaction analysis.

Complete validation includes functionality validation, integration validation, and security and data validation.

The automated testing philosophy identifies the key business and user components and leverages tools and frameworks to automate testing.

Proactive defect detection and prevention aims to identify the defects early in the game and proactively prevent any potential defects.

Performance focus aims to avoid potential performance issues by incorporating performance best practices and checklists during early stages of a project.

The main testing metrics include test coverage, response time, page size, and others.

Other dimensions of testing include security testing, services testing, and testing in cached environments.

7.4.4 Accessing environments from outside the organization’s network

If this is a web-based application, which environments can be accessed externally, i.e, from outside of the organization’s network? Is there really a legitimate business requirement to allow DEV, QA, Staging, or TEST environments to be accessed from outside the firewall? If the development or test teams need to work on them remotely they should use virtual private network (VPN) access to log onto the network. If legitimate users connect to the network using a VPN, then there is no need to have the web site accessible outside the network.

What are the risks of having your nonproduction sites accessible externally? To understand the risk you have to answer the question “Do they have all the security protection that the PROD environment has?” If you answered “yes” to that question are you really sure about it? Sometimes when environments are set up corners are cut when developing nonproduction environments because people assume non-production sites don’t need to be as secure as a production environment.

Any environment that contains live data, even if it’s outdated, needs to be tightly secured. This is why data on a non-PROD environment shouldn’t be live.

Social Media and Social Networking Sites

Interestingly, Google provides more than three times as many hits for the term “social media” as for the term “emotion” despite the fact that “social media” has existed in the English language for only a fraction of the time. Clearly, social media is a popular topic that has received considerable attention during its limited existence. Nevertheless, researchers have highlighted the complexity of defining what exactly constitutes social media, particularly in relation to “Web 2.0” and user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Consequently, it is important to briefly distinguish and highlight the overlap between these terms. Web 2.0 refers to a change in the way that developers and individuals use and interact with the World Wide Web, with an emphasis on sharing and collaboratively modifying or annotating content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; see also O’Reilly, 2009). As such, the World Wide Web went from a platform where individuals posted content that was largely static, to a platform where content could be generated by creators working in collaboration and shared with consumers, who themselves can comment on and reshare the content (see Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).

Web 2.0 collaboration tools hold distinct benefits for education, shifting the web from a medium for information delivery, to one where users actively interact, transform, and create information stored in multiple modalities. One can draw similarities between the movement from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and advancing upwards Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956). Bloom’s taxonomy is a popular method of classifying human cognition hierarchically that has for decades informed teaching and learning practices. Specifically, the progression from superficial and basic educational objectives at the base of Bloom’s taxonomy, pertaining to simple recall of information, aligns with the Web 1.0 platform. In contrast, higher-level objectives that require creation, integration, and application of knowledge (eg, “deep learning”) seem to better reflect the nature of the Web 2.0 platform.

The emergence of Web 2.0 made interacting online accessible to the average person and consequently led to the proliferation of user-generated content. User-generated content is the aggregate of ways that individuals utilize social media (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010) and generally consists of content that is created through open collaboration (Levine & Prietula, 2013). Accordingly, we adopt Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010, p. 61) definition of social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content.” Given the heterogeneous designs and purposes of the varied social media platforms available, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) divide social media into six categories ranging, for instance, from blogs to virtual game worlds to social networking sites, the latter being the focus of this chapter.

Social network sites are web-based applications that enable individuals to construct shared or partially shared accounts, to browse and connect with other user accounts, and to make these interactions or connections public (see Boyd & Ellison, 2008). Popular examples of social network sites include Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Tumblr, and LinkedIn, each of which provide similar functionality in terms of sharing content and connecting with other users but differ in their underlying objectives. For example, Facebook is primarily used to share personal information and images, as well as to plan events with friends; whereas LinkedIn is a service designed to facilitate the development of professional networks with the goal of career advancement. Furthermore, social network sites often are either partially public (eg, the account name or handle is searchable but protected) or shared fully with the public (eg, unrestricted access to posted text, images, videos, location, or connections with others). As such, these sites provide insight into the online identity that individuals present, including one’s social life, behaviors, opinions, and thoughts, and consequently afford researchers a unique window into human functioning and interactions. This is particularly useful given the scope of information that is publicly shared and the extensiveness of these social networks, in particular Facebook and Twitter.1

Facebook is perhaps the most well-known and popular social network site with 1.28 billion active monthly users as of March. 31 2014 (Company Info, 2014). Facebook allows users to write blog entries in the form of status updates organized in a timeline and can include photos, videos, location markers, and life event tags. Depending on the desired privacy settings selected in Facebook, friends included within a user’s network are allowed to comment on the status updates, indicate what they like, or share the update with others. Users can view either their own timeline or those of others who are aggregated and shared across the network. Meanwhile, Twitter reports 255 million active monthly users with approximately 500 million messages sent per day (Twitter Usage, 2014). Twitter is a microblogging site that shares similar characteristics with Facebook, but restrict posts by limiting text to 140 characters (Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohs, & Meyer, 2010). These messages, or “tweets,” can be tagged with a location marker and categorized by including hashtags (ie, #) to denote a particular topic or theme of the message. Furthermore, users have the option to share other users’ tweets with a “retweet.”

Given that these social network sites provide users with a platform to share personal information, as well as the popularity of these sites among students, they are useful for researchers in general and educational researchers in particular. Although the remainder of this chapter will focus on the study of emotional content posted on Facebook and Twitter, the research findings and recommendations proposed are relevant and can be adapted to a variety of social network sites within most social science domains. Clearly, there is a wealth of potentially useful and rich information shared on social network sites, but how exactly can researchers make sense of this copious amount of data?