Build A World Wide Web Commerce Center

Here at The Web Developer's Journal, we define "Web commerce" as the practice of conducting transactions over the Web, whether by means of credit cards, "digital cash,' or some other payment method. This book does describe cryptography, digital certificates, and secure Web protocols, and discusses the various "digital cash" solutions, as well as covering security issues in the sections on NT Web servers, but it does not mention shopping cart software, nor does it explain how credit cards work, much less tell you how to set up online ordering on a Web site.

This book was written by net.Genesis, who make several Web software packages, including net.Analysis, net.Thread and net.Form. Naturally, their products are well covered, but there is no blatant bias, apart from the NT slant. This book is basically an overview of setting up an NT Web server, with discussions of some other Web software packages, including traffic reporting, database connectivity and discussion group applications. Despite the title, Build A World Wide Web Commerce Center includes only a little material about Web commerce issues per se. Build A World Wide Web Commerce Center begins with the premise that all business Web sites should be hosted in-house, and that the server platform should be NT. The first proposition is very dubious, to say the least. In my experience, the only companies who find it cost-effective to run their own servers are either very large, or have some service-provider aspect to their business.

This book presents a wildly exaggerated example of the costs and inconvenience of using a service provider to host a site, in order to justify their conclusion that you simply must set up a server scene of your own. This also conveniently justifies the fact that a book about Web commerce devotes almost half its pages to getting connected to the Internet and configuring a Web server. Unix is summarily poo-pooed as something only propheads can possibly understand. Although Unix is a powerful operating system designed for technical markets, for PC-based businesses raised on Windows, switching to Unix is a difficult - if not impossible - transition. Partially true, and one of many good reasons to outsource your hosting, let the geeks at your ISP deal with Unix, and move on to running the business that you're in. But anyway…


The two most popular Web security protocols, Secure HTTP (SHTTP) and SSL, are described in this chapter, and in more detail later in the chapters on configuring particular Web server packages. A cryptography primer explains public key cryptography, the U.S. government restrictions on encryption software, digital certificates and certification authorities (again, the actual process of obtaining and installing a digital certificate is gone into in more detail in later chapters about server packages.). Payment methods, including credit cards and three forms of "e-cash" (CyberCash, DigiCash and First Virtual) are briefly discussed.

After a chapter with some good general advice on running a business Web site, the main section of the book begins: setting up an NT Web server. There's a chapter on setting up NT as a platform for your server, a chapter on getting connected to the Net, and a chapter apiece on the three most popular NT server packages: Microsoft's Internet Information Server, Netscape's Commerce Server, and O'Reilly's WebSite Professional. Each of these chapters is commerce-conscious, explaining how to configure the various security options, how to obtain digital certificates, and how to get set up to serve secure Web pages through either SSL or SHTTP.

The next section tells how to use what the authors call "The Big Three Tools": Traffic analysis, forms and database connectivity, and discussion groups. Now, it happens that net.Genesis sells applications in all three of these categories. Not surprisingly, there's a chapter apiece about how to use net.Analysis to track and analyse your site traffic, net.Form to allow users to communicate with databases via forms on your site, and net.Thread to create discussion groups. Competing packages are mentioned, and there is a lot of good general information about getting the most out of these important tools, even if you don't buy their brand.

All in all, Build A World Wide Web Commerce Center is not a bad book. It's sloppily edited, with typos aplenty, and the layout and organization is mediocre, but the writing is good, and the information is solid. If you are looking for an overview of the process of setting up a Web server on NT, and choosing a server package, this book would be a good choice. It uses layman's language, and goes into no really technical detail, but tells you what you need to know. As I already made clear, this is not a comprehensive look at Web commerce. At the risk of being too critical, I could wonder whether the title of the book was changed at the last minute, in order to try to jump onto the "Web commerce" bandwagon that is now gathering speed. That would be consistent with my otherwise irrelevant observation that the picture on the cover (like most Wiley books, a medieval scene) depicts not commerce, but agriculture.

ISBN# 0-471-14928-4
1996
Price: $29.95

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
605 Third Ave
New York, NY 10158