Introduction

Abstract

The World Wide Web has grown phenomenally over the last decade. Ranging from the growth of Web servers across the Web, the rapid adoption of Hyper-Text Markup Language, to the availability of information in the form of hundreds of millions of Web pages that are linked to each other, the Web has changed the way in which information is accessed, how people communicate with each other and how buying/selling activities are accomplished with electronic commerce. With such rapid growth and adoption of the Web, technology has been struggling to keep up with emerging standards, highly competitive marketplace, and a maturing technology. Over the last decade, Web technology has transformed into a unique field of study. While the underlying technologies are distributed systems, networking, information retrieval and security, the specialization and application of these technologies to build scalable Web systems makes the study of Web technology unique.

‘Let me light my lamp’, says the star. ‘And never debate if it will help to remove the darkness’