The tasks that the machine performs define a server, not the hardware itself. The location and spatial requirements of servers also vary. A small operation may serve its needs with a desktop computer. You will also see small racks or huge racks with hundreds of servers rarely touched by human hands. Fundamentally, the server is a computer that is attached to the Internet and can run the required software.
Basically, the hardware end of the Web servers is just a computer-any ‘box’ will do. The brains and grunt work of Web services takes place on the software side. The requirements of the software determine how powerful the box needs to be. Common examples of server software include Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache Web Server, or iPlanetWeb server.
Server software must be compatible with the operating system platform of the computer it’s running on, and Web server software comes bundled together with the box. For example, the Apache Web Server program would not run on a machine with the NT operating system, but you could run it on Red Hat Linux Professional or the Solaris 8 Operating Environment. Microsoft IIS runs with the Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server of NT.
The distinction should be obvious from reading about Internet protocols. One function of Web server software is to recognize the ‘dumbed-down’ packets traveling the Internet and to translate these messages into instructions to be executed. Web server software responds when its IP address is called on. It monitors traffic and provides the glue that connects your website to the outside world. In addition, many websites demand more than simply serving up static Web pages. Among the functions that Web server software may perform are verifying credit cards, registering users, and creating database records. To achieve more sophisticated functionality, specialized server applications have emerged for customized tasks, beyond simply serving up Web pages or connecting to a database

CONNECTED DATABASES
Web developers often talk about performing a function ‘on the back end,’ which means on the Web server (rather than on the user’s browser). The most common function performed on the back end is interactivity with a database. Interaction with a backend database delivers a qualitative jump in the capabilities of a website. All sorts of functions can be delivered that otherwise would be economically unfeasible, if not impossible.
For example, imagine a music website that categorizes bands by type of music, showing a page for each band, all of which are identical except for the specifics of that band. You might use static pages, creating long lists of the bands in each category, and individual pages for each band (Figure 2.4). This manual approach might work fine for 10, 20, maybe even 50 bands. But what happens when you’re ready to go to the next level? Would the process work for a website featuring thousands of bands? Not very efficiently. Creating, maintaining, and testing so many individual pages would give you headaches and bust your budget in no time.
With a backend database, you could grow your band website with ease. Your standardized categories of information about each band would consist of records in the database. When a user picks a particular band, the server software queries the database, and the appropriate data flow into a master template on the site. Your job would be to populate the database, and fill-in forms would make this task easy. Scalability is a key consideration in website design, and databases can provide it. On the user’s end, a database would allow more reliable searching than a static Web site. Users search for bands playing country music or another favorite type of music. The search function is merely a query on a database, and the server software is the engine behind it.

In the heat of a project, all three factors-time, task, and resources-are ever changing, constantly interacting variables. The job of the project manager is to constantly balance these three factors. Suppose management transfers a key team member to another project, restricts access to equipment, or cuts the budget. As a result, the project either takes longer to complete becomes less ambitious in scope, or both. Likewise, if the design is scaled back project can be finished faster or with fewer people. The main goal of project management is to constantly balance these factors in flux.
By manipulating these factors, you can exert considerable control over the project. Your command of their interplay will help you:
*Explain schedule delays.
*Say ‘no’ to design changes and ‘feature creep’ with good reasons.
*Justify increased personnel and equipment requests.
*Recognize opportunities to improve project dynamics.
Only by examining these factors on an ongoing basis can you identify trouble spots and proactively address growing problems. Once a crisis hits, your analysis will help you learn from your mistakes, but you will fall short of saving the project at hand. Prevention always works better. Project management software can help you monitor progress. When you watch these factors on a daily basis, you can make minor adjustments along the way and avoid crises before they develop.
For example, our project developing an e-commerce website for an association publisher was slow getting started because of a resource problem. The plan for the site required a full feature set, including an online catalog of books and promotional items with cross-referencing ability, user surveys, a guest book, customer reviews, and multiple searching options. The project was adequately funded and scheduled accordingly. As development began, however, it became apparent that not enough people were working in content development. This limiting factor set a slower top speed for product development, lengthening the schedule requirements in other project areas. Next, the effect of the lengthened schedule lowered the project’s priority in the eyes of the external programming team, compounding the scheduling problem as the work took a backseat to more active projects. As development drifted on at this slow pace, the site was at risk of stalling entirely. With little to show in the way of progress and the deadline approaching, the project managers feared that their funding might be withdrawn. Saving the project called for drastic measures.
First, the project manager trimmed the task by narrowing the feature set to the minimum necessary. Next, a new content lead came to the project and staff was brought over from other projects to quickly populate the backend database with content. The project manager rescheduled the due date with the external programming staff and sought their commitment, with assurances that the project was on track and would move quickly. The abridged first version was ready to go live in a few months. In terms of the three factors, a shortage in the anticipated resources was addressed by lengthening the time factor and decreasing the task.
A natural reaction in such a situation, however, is to make up for lost time by pressuring programmers, while avoiding any adjustment to the project. Although this approach may improve appearances in the short term, it is usually not effective in the long haul. You may inspire spurts of super-productivity, but this pace is difficult to sustain. Work patterns gravitate toward their equilibrium. If you must apply pressure to change programmers’ behavior, then you may have to keep the heat on for the remainder of the project. As the programmers become desensitized to such pressure over time, you will need to become increasingly firm.

Obtaining more resources (money) is always a difficult, if not impossible, proposition. And extending the delivery date does not necessarily decrease the cost and may conflict with other organizational objectives. Increasing the schedule is a quadruple threat for the following reasons:
1.Changing the timing of the product introduction can have all sorts of negative marketing and sales consequences.
2.Costs increase because people must be paid to work on the project for a longer amount of time.
3.Additional schedule time leaves an opening for additional ‘feature creep.’
4.Extended timelines sometimes take the pressure off the development staff, which can lessen the urgency they feel to complete the task.
By process of elimination then, the decision often boils down to changing the design specification. Depending on the specific situation, however, fine-tuning any of the three factors is a possibility. Discuss the options with members of the Web development team as well as others in the organization who may be affected by your decision. Specialists in marketing, sales, and technology can often suggest alternatives of which you are unaware. As the project manager, you are responsible for finding a way to fix things through creative problem solving and an intimate knowledge of the development process.

Tightening Up a Loose Project

By identifying bottlenecks in the development process and reassigning tasks to widen those bottlenecks, you can often tighten up a loose project. For example, imagine creating a Web-based training program that contains numerous interactive simulations, all of which are individually programmed. The whole project may depend on a single programmer who is placing graphics, programming the simulations, and performing software testing. This heavy individual responsibility represents a substantial bottleneck.

Crises

Websites tend to be prone to crises, for the following reasons:
1.As software projects, they are subject to the many unknowns inherent to the invention or development process.
2.Cultural differences among team members from different disciplines (e.g., programming, writing, art and design, network technology, systems analysis) can lead to miscommunication and other management difficulties.
3.Team members new to website development projects must climb a steep learning curve, which slows down the process and leaves you vulnerable to mistakes.

Breaking It Down

When a crisis develops, separate the project factors and examine each issue to see what’s wrong. With a bit of luck, they can be fixed and realigned.

Maintaining Balance

So much of work comes down to people, which are categorized as resources in the project management model. If a key programmer finds another job halfway through the project, you face a resource problem. Personnel performance problems or interpersonal relations on the development team are not uncommon sources of delay. If a squabble breaks out between the programming and testing personnel, you also have a resource problem. Not that you do not have enough resources, but in this case, they cannot be used effectively because of the argument.
Websites are fluid, ever-changing works in progress. They reside in an online medium where change is an expectation. Often, shifting company priorities require updates, reorganization, and even redesign; therefore, the task factor is often a moving target. Estimating the resource and time factors of the ‘final application’ is especially difficult because the application is never truly finished.

Without an understanding of how factors interrelate, you can easily slip into a reactive mode, constantly responding to the crisis of the moment. Once these three factors are understood and appreciated, however, they become the reins of control by which you can effectively manage the development and maintenance of a complex website.
These three factors of time, task, and resources constantly interact in a Web project, changing priorities and fluctuating in importance as the project advances. Understanding how they interact gives you a valuable and objective perspective that helps demystify the development process. The project manager must juggle these factors and make decisions about tradeoffs and compromises along the way.
In Dynamics of Software Development, Microsoft’s Jim McCarthy writes: ‘As a development manager, you’re working with only three things: resources (people and money), features (the product and its quality), and the schedule. This triangle of elements is all you work with. There’s nothing else to be worked with.’ These three factors can be represented as the three points of a triangle.
The project management can be represented as a triangle: time, task, and resources.

Time

For the purposes of a website, the available time is indicated in the project schedule-specifically, the period from start date to completion deadline; that is, when the site is to ‘go live.’ The schedule relates to the nature of the task (as designed) and the available resources (people and equipment). As a rule, the more resources available and the simpler the design, the faster the task can be accomplished, but only to a point. One might suppose that a project that takes one year with only one person working on it would take six months with two people and one month with twelve. In practice, however, adding more people does not reduce the amount of time at the same rate; a point of diminishing returns occurs when the overhead of communication and administration to coordinate the myriad of people and activities negates the increased work actually being performed.
Some tasks, by their nature, take longer and depend heavily on the talent, skills, and experience of the individuals performing them. Software programming is the best example, where the effectiveness of different programmers can vary by several orders of magnitude. An experienced, creative programmer may complete a task in a few days, whereas another programmer lacking experience or motivation may need several months or may be incapable of completing the task at all. Even a particular individual’s temperament may be more or less well suited for a particular task. In some situations, a programming task can be speeded up considerably by hiring the right programmer, or slowed down a similar amount by adding several inappropriate programmers.
Occasionally, the fastest way to complete the project is not to change anything. Even though progress may appear to be going exceedingly slowly, maintaining the existing situation may be the most efficient option.

Task

The task refers to exactly what is being built. Task expresses the scope of the work to be performed: the magnitude, complexity, and design of the project. For a website, this consists of the site design, including quantity of content and programmatic features. This definition of the end product determines the number of people necessary to produce the site, the skills they must have, the kind of equipment they will need, and how long it will take them to complete the first version of the site.

Resources

Resources refer to the funding for the project and all that it purchases in terms of people’s time and services, materials, and equipment. In general, more funding enables a faster development schedule (time) or a more complex, higher-quality site; however, as noted earlier, if a project has fallen behind schedule, adding resources (people and money) does not always speed it up. Adding people to a project that has fallen behind schedule can cause it to fall even further behind if the wrong resources are added or are added at the wrong time. When more highly skilled and specialized resources are needed, they should be added early or not at all.

To a certain extent, project management is project management, regardless of the industry. As an established discipline, project management, has its eternal truths, systems that work no matter what project you’re managing. In theory, project management is portable from industry to industry; however, project management is more than a theory, it’s a practice. The project manager’s practice involves communication, problem solving, and decision making, all of which require a solid technical grasp of the field. Even in the role of facilitator and motivator, the project manager needs technical knowledge to earn the credibility and respect of team members.
This chapter introduces some of the basic technology underlying websites and website development. It is meant as a jumping-off point. To those new to website development, this discussion will at least help you become conversant in the technology and know the sorts of questions you should be asking. It will also help you identify the gaps in your knowledge. It’s up to you to bring yourself up to speed, whether through outside reading, classes, seminars, or workshops. Project managers of websites often grow into the position from a specialty within the development process and boast detailed technical knowledge within the specialty. As for the specialized skills plied by others on the team, they may possess only superficial familiarity. The systems analyst, for instance, may be an expert on the architecture of a database but may have no understanding of what the designer has done to prepare image files that go into it.
CLIENT-SERVER SYSTEMS
The Internet is sometimes referred to as a network of networks, a grand and complex system of clients and servers. In a world where computers and networks are ubiquitous in all sorts of organizations, the terms client and server are bandied about regularly, but they are not always clearly understood. The operating premise of a network is that computers are called on to perform specialized tasks.

Internet Protocols. How Files Travel the Internet

The many clients and servers that constitute the Internet can cooperate because they speak the same language. Beneath the many operating systems and software programs working the Internet is a lingua franca, specifically a series of protocols. For instance, when you surf your way to a new site, your Web browser is using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and a URL (uniform resource locator) to identify a file to be retrieved. TCP (transmission control protocol) and IP (Internet protocol) route the request to the proper server.
Applications require specific formats in order to present the data in a useful format. If you have ever opened up an e-mail attachment and found gobbledygook ASCII text when you expected a stunning picture of your newborn niece, then you know what happens when the requirements are not met. In networking parlance, this is referred to as the presentation level. Examples of data formats that make files useful over the Internet are HTML, JPEG, or MIME.

TCP/IP

TCP/IP is the protocol that takes care of all of the networking details of a file so that the application can treat it like a simple data stream. TCP and IP work closely together and often are considered as one but are actually separate protocols. IP is the most fundamental protocol. It runs on all the computers of a network as well as routers, which connect two or more networks together, allowing these multiple machines and networks to function as one logical network. IP is so generic and undemanding that just about any network technology that might turn up in a network can handle it. IP is used to make routing decisions. Using hierarchical addresses, it finds a route for a packet and gets it to the other end.

DOMAIN NAME SERVERS

IP addresses effectively identify computers on the Internet and enable routing. The numerical IP addresses work fine for computers but are not so friendly to humans-we like names. Domain name server (DNS) is the naming system of the Internet. Domain names, like IP addresses, are hierarchical. The names are processed from right to left. The top-level domain is to the far right, common examples of which are: com, edu, gov, org, net.

APPLICATION PROTOCOLS

The primary application protocol at work on the World Wide Web is HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). HTTP is the common protocol that enables any browser (e.g., Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera) to access the same Web page.

INTERNET FILE FORMATS

At the presentation level, applications depend on specific file formats so that data can be displayed in a useful way, as intended. Graphics, for example, need to be either JPEGs or GIFs to display through a Web browser. As you manage the content development of your website project, you will be working with multimedia content in any number of file formats.
All Web browsers read a few basic file formats, which are sometimes called Web-native. The format for text is HTML (hypertext markup language). JavaScript adds features that HTML cannot support independently-programmatic features such as variables, logic branching, and math calculations.