website investigation
back-end processes
introduction
Up until now in my investigation I have been focusing solely on the front-end of eBuyer’s operation. In this section I will strive to clearly portray a complete picture of all of the exchanges of information between the customer’s computer, eBuyer’s web server and database, and any other external data stores. At eBuyer nearly all of the information processed passes at one time or another through eBuyer’s web server, therefore this machine has to be very powerful, otherwise users will find that navigating the site will be very slow and frustrating.
series of events
The first event in the whole operation is when the customer enters eBuyer’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into the web browser (http://www.ebuyer.com/). This is the web server’s address on the World Wide Web. Ebuyer’s web server then responds to this request and sends the end-user’s web browser the HTML code of the home page so that it can be displayed to the end-user. The next stage is the search phase. This is when the customer either browses or searches the web site for a particular product or product type. From eBuyer’s home page end-users are able to do both. During this process the end-user either makes navigational choices or enters information into forms. This information is sent to the web server which processes it by generating the criteria into a query that can be understood by eBuyer’s database, and then it is used to search the products entity. The results of the search are then sent back to the web server from the database which then turns the results into mark-up which is then sent to the end-user.
These two processes can be presented clearly in a simple information flow diagram:
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