Television has been mentioned as the twentieth-century technology that has had the most significant social and cultural impact. The Internet is all set to shine in this twenty-first century. The Internet is an international network of computers, or, more accurately, a network of networks. For example, the network at Kyoto University is joined, via the Internet, to other networks all over the world, giving users global access to people and information. The Internet is the hardware of network cables, hubs, repeaters, routers, gateways, and so on that enable computers from all around the world to communicate with one another. In the beginning, the Internet served as a medium for members of government and educational institutions to communicate and to exchange information. The Internet expedites communication and interactions between individuals and groups of people having common interests.

There are various resources available on the Internet, including e-mail, FTP, Gopher, Telnet and so on. These resources require dedicated software tools with each resource having its own user interface. As a result, the different Internet resources with their different interfaces can at times present a confusing system. The World Wide Web or shortly the Web combines many of the Internet resources into a consistent, user-friendly front end that is much easier to handle. The Web acts as a universal, continuously updated library of all human knowledge. Given its pervasiness, it is hard to believe that it is barely 10 years old. The Web is a distributed information service on the Internet that allows access to documents containing links. Information on the Web is displayed in the form of hypertext and hypermedia documents. Using the Web, one can access information located somewhere in the world. The level of user interaction on the Web ranges from the simple selection and retrieval of Web documents to the submission of completed forms, the inquiry of databases, and the ability to access multimedia computer-based learning packages.

A hypertext document may be entered at many points and may be browsed in any order by interactively choosing highlighted words or phrases to jump to the next text or image to be viewed. The highlighted word or phrase in a hypertext document is a hot link and when selected by using a mouse, usually brings information relevant to the word or phrase to be displayed. Hypermedia is a more accurate term that hypertext since the links in the WWW are not constrained to being text only. Links can also be made with still images, sound and video clips.

The Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) is the language that is used to write WWW documents. The user-friendly front end of the Web is a browser. This is the software package that reads and renders the HTML pages as human-readable pages. A Web browser provides the means to perform the tasks such as, searching the Web, to use the links in a hypertext document to move to different networked sites on the Web, to access any site on the Web, and download files from other sites on the Web. The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules that defines and controls the flow of information via the Web. Both the Web server and Web browser understand the HTTP language, and they use it to communicate with one another. Part of the server's job is to store Web documents; the other part is to deliver the documents over the network to the Web browser making a request for the documents.

In the mean time, a number of exciting, robust Web technologies and tools came out from the research labs. Consequently the Internet became a multimedia, user-friendly environment. A number of dazzling, graphics-rich, informative and display-oriented Web sites got sprouted out in the Internet representing a variety of professions, organizations, corporations, educational institutions, companies and governments. As Web use has grown, so has its role as an application environment. Originally, it served mainly as a document repository with an improved means of navigation. With the advent of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in the NCSA HTTPd Web server, this changed significantly. CGI introduced the idea of dynamic content. Instead of simply retrieving stored documents, a CGI script generates the equivalent of a Web page on the fly. Scripts written in a programming or script language have access to databases, system services, and most other application resources. This allows CGI scripts to generate and deliver highly selective information to the desktop on an up-to-the minute basis. Searchable databases on various items and information can be widely available at the click of a mouse button. There is no doubt that this feature has been a prime factor for the astounding growth of the Web.

Thus there are mark-up languages, script languages and technologies for developing nice-looking Web pages on the client side. They are Java applets, ActiveX controls, dynamic HTML and JavaScript. Simultaneously there came a number of fine-tuning scripting languages and compact technologies, server tools and engines on the server side to generate dynamic web pages. They are Microsoft's Active Server Pages, PHP, ColdFusion, Sun's JavaServer Pages and Java Servlets.

With the advent of client/server model of computing especially in the Internet and the related technologies, the Internet transformed into an informational resource for the common man. This opened the flood gates for a number of innovations in the Internet, such as e-learning, e-banking, e-entertainment, e-business, and so on and the importance of Web-based database has been realized.