ISP, IAP, IPP, IIS, ASP, JSP, PHP: give me a break!

The world of computing is easy. You just have to understand the language. As far as getting your pages on the web is concerned, the good news is that you only need to understand very little of it.

The language of the Internet is riddled with TLAs - that's short for Three Letter Acronyms. We'll talk about a few of them here in relation to web sites.

An ISP is an Internet Service Provider. It is used as a wide meaning term to describe any organisation that provides services to connect you to the Internet or make your site available on the Internet. It is far more commonly used that the two terms it embraces: IAP and IPP. An IAP is an Internet Access Provider, whilst an IPP is an Internet Presence Provider. Many of the early organisations which provided Internet services acted as both IAPs and IPPs - hence the more global term ISP which includes both, tended to be used.

Your dial up access to the Internet is provided by an IAP - Internet Access Provider.

People who provide the web space and related services for housing your Internet site are the IPPs - Internet Presence Providers. They give your site its presence on the Internet. In addition to providing the space they also provide security systems and backup/recovery systems for your site. They also make it possible for your site to be able to run programs to assist in providing information to your web pages. A 'search' facility on a web site is actually a program run in the Internet Presence Provider's computer (its server) which searches the web site for the words you selected. Similarly, a 'Feedback' form can kick off a program on the server to process the information sent from the web browser to the server. Usually feedback programs just reformat the data before saving it or forwarding it.

When you get a dial up account from your IAP you may also be given some free web space to put web pages onto the Internet. Usually this space has drawbacks. Generally these come in two forms. Firstly, you web page may be run inside another web page which has banners to advertise a sponsor's products. Secondly, you are usually not allowed to use the processing resources of the server which means that things like search pages won't work. Almost certainly you won't be able to use 'secure forms' which allow your to take credit card information and the like over the Internet in a data-secure way. Thus your IAP is providing IPP services but in a very limited way. If you are using the space for personal purposes this is often not an issue for you.

However, web space which is specifically paid for by you and used for commercial purposes generally do not suffer from these drawbacks. You can feel confident that your site will work as designed and be able to be expanded as your needs change. This is the kind of service you should be looking for when you put a business web site on the Internet.

The program that gets the web pages off your IPPs server computer is called a web server. Web servers are mostly run on two main operating systems: Windows based (specifically Microsoft Windows NT) and UNIX type operating systems (such as UNIX and LINUX).

Over 50% of web servers running the world wide web are UNIX based, usually running the Apache Web Server. Unix and Linux have a particularly enviable reputation for not crashing unexpectedly - a frustration not spared to users of some other operating systems. Likewise the Apache web server is known for its stability.

IIS (another TLA) means Internet Information Server. It is a Microsoft product and runs only on Windows NT. Many large organisations running Intranets (internal internets) use Microsoft products for this purpose. IIS allows the server to support Microsoft FrontPage Extensions: these are the special programs that provide facilities such as feedback forms and search facilities. If the site you developed with Microsoft FrontPage doesn't work when you upload it to the Internet it can be caused by these extensions not being available on the server. This is especially true if your web space was provided for free.

ASP means Active Server Pages. This is a Microsoft Internet based technology which enables web pages to be highly interactive. Information you type into a web page as a web site visitor can be transmitted to the server and processing be done based on this such as:

looking up information in a database to verify the information you entered

collecting information from a database, creating a web page on the fly, and displaying it on your browser

creating and processing shopping carts.

Systems such as this are known as client-server systems and have been in commercial use since the mid 1980’s.

On UNIX systems similar functionality is provided by JSP - Java Server Pages, and PHP (which stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor - probably an acronym devised after people had been down the pub - actually it stands for Personal Home Page - the inventor of the language used it to display his CV!). This kind of technology will play a major part in the development of services which will be available on the Internet. We live in exciting times.

So what do you need to care about as someone who wants web pages on the Internet? My answer is that you need to understand the distinction between an IAP and an IPP and the services they provide. Make sure that your site is hosted on commercial web space even if you do have to pay for it. If your site contains flashing banners advertising someone else's products you need to ask yourself 'Is is my site promoting my company or is it being used to attract visitors so that someone else's products and services can be promoted to them.' If these flashing banners weren't important they wouldn't be prominently displayed at the the TOP of your web page , they would be at the bottom. Putting it simply, if you're not at the top of your web page it's not your web page.

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