E-Commerce Effects To Consumers

There is no one best answer for every application, much as we may like to recommend Linux to everyone simply because it can do everything and has the advantages of being open source and politically correct. If your data is all on an IBM mainframe, or the data of your business partners, you are naturally going to move in that direction, and you can readily perform web-based E-Commerce on those platforms. IBM has been moving in an open standards direction for at least three years, and Java servlets are the solution that everyone in the AS/400 community seems to want to move towards. Under Linux and Apache, of course, Java servlets are heavily tested and very secure. Open standard, portable solutions are a lot harder to come by in the Microsoft centric world, because of the heavy investment in ASP and non-portable extensions to Java, but there are certainly times when, because of the data you already have, a Microsoft NT based web server may seem to be the least painful way of starting to do web commerce. Going back to the idea of a security review, if the data is not very critical or very private, you can choose the appropriate level of security, and Microsoft products may be just fine for something that you need to roll out quickly which doesn't matter that much, and will not get very much user load. There might even be times when it will stand up to serious load, but the growing pains, possibilities of virus and security problems, and incompatibility with anything else make it difficult to recommend in good conscience. Large commercial UNIX servers from Sun, HP, or SGI are relatively complex to administer, much like IBM servers, but can provide extremely variable configurations, take serious load, give you the vendor's professional support services, and all have interchangeable open standard paths available alongside Linux. Moving from one to the other is the simplest thing in the world, and a small server supported in-house on Linux could be ported to a large server on one of the commercial flavors of UNIX with almost no changes.