If you are planning to
develop a web site, with transactional support
under a Microsoft Platform, here it is a few
points you must focus in..
Target or audience (how
many concurrent users will connect to your
server). Less or more than 10. This will tell
you which Operating System version you must
install.
Static or dynamic content.
Data Access (If it is
required or not)
User friendly internet
address (IP or domain name)
Content weight (heavy
downloads or just html content)
Security: You will enable
private zones (user & pass required)
Vulnerabilities: Check the
Server weakness with the oficial software
manufacturer documentation.
With this topics in mind you
will ask the question: Is really the most
convinient, install a web server at home?
If your answer is yes, it is because you have
resolved a good percentage of this points.
Tools:
Broadband internet access:
Ask to your ISP for the downstream and
upstream speeds. Your clients will get data
connections at your upstream speed.
Server/s: MS Windows 2K
Server or Win2K Pro with IIS in both cases.
Hardware requirement considerations taking in
mind your application workload.
Knowledge of HTML, Java as
well as Microsoft ASP programing languages.
Knowlegde about Networking
if you need to mount a LAN to support a
backend server. (Database dedicated server).
If the application does not require a huge
processing workload, both.. web server anda
database server could reside on the same
server. This is not a very good practice, but
it could cover your initial concept test.
Domain name: If your ISP
does not provide you an static public IP
address, this mean you have a dynamic public
IP... you could use some dynamic DNS service
like
www.no-ip.com or DNS2Go. So you can have
Online visibility with a public domain name,
not the yours one, but a public domain at
least.
If your web site content is
heavy, and you expect to have a lot of
concurrent users connected, the web server at
home it is not a good choice.
You must enable secure
access to some parts of your web site, aplying
security policies at Folder and file level,
this is possible with IIS 5.0 integrated to a
Win2K domain - e.g: Digest Authentication -
(big work). Or managing your own security
access philosophy based in your database,
including a the header of all your "secured"
files a call to a session check for
authentication. Programming stuff...
Aply the security patchs
that every Operating System has, included
Linux, if you choose this one.
More tools:
Graphic designer tool, like
fireworks from Macromedia.
Frontpage or Visual
Interdev (VB if you need to write some
encapsulated components).
MS Access or SQL Server.
Knowlegde of ODBC access. There is a lot of
information about this, a good start point
could be:
http://www.w3schools.com
