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Business Intelligence and Web Front-ends

Introduction

The complexity of Web technology has increased greatly since the first simple browsers became popular in the nineties. The original idea was very simple: Web servers provided access to simple formatted texts which could contain hyperlinks to other texts, creating a worldwide web of interlinked documents.

Since then the technology has flourished in many ways, but it is possible to cut through the almost impenetrable thicket of technologies by classifying the developments. Once you do this, things look much simpler.

The original hypertext markup language HTML has gotten much more complex, allowing much better formatting and interaction. Most importantly, HTML pages can embed various non-text objects, a capability that was originally intended for displaying images.
Originally, HTML files were stored on the Web server and served up on request. This has changed a great deal, and now most Web pages are provided by content management systems which may serve static HTML files or assemble the HTML files based on the requests that come from the browser using data held in various databases. Thus the business intelligence software that creates Web content often comes with a simple BI portal.
The HTML pages now embed scripts that run in the browser and allow the documents to be dynamic – that is, to modify themselves on-the-fly while the user interacts with them. The language of these scripts is JavaScript, which was originally invented by Netscape. Netscape created a lot of confusion when it chose this name, because JavaScript has nothing whatsoever to do with Sun’s Java language, except for some superficial similarities in the syntax.
The objects embedded in the HTML pages have gotten more and more complex. The original images have now been replaced by various interactive objects. The Java programming language actually embeds a complete virtual machine – a sort of toy computer – into the document. This approach has been copied by several vendors, including Microsoft with its .NET technology, which is nearly a clone of Java, and increasingly by Adobe’s Flash technology, which was originally intended for cute little scripted animations but now has many more capabilities.

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