General Web Issues > Web Component Architecture
Published: 2005-09-26

Web sites are organic, in that they are constantly growing, evolving and changing. What starts as a simple market communications vehicle often develops advanced functionality that enables it to server as a comprehensive collaboration, communications, and business process automation tool. Unfortunately it doesn't just happen this way. Taking a simple website, and adding advanced database driven capabilities to it requires some foresight and planning. The problem is especially significant for large, distributed organizations such as member based associations, and tiered organizations.

Let's start at the beginning. Simple websites are just that, simple. They often have static html pages, no security, or limited security capability, and almost never any security management capability. This is fine for a single organization, whose web site is designed to communicate information publicly to a specific target audience. It even works well where information is communicated publically to multiple audiences, for example customers, and press.

Where it starts to break down is selected information must be hidden from one audience or another. Where it breaks down entirely is where more than one group is responsible for updating information for the different audiences.

Imagine a website that is designed to support a national association, with regional chapters and local sub-chapters. The obvious architecture for an organization of this type is to have a system that has a single database of members/users, and a different access control security system for each part of the organization. Seems simple? Just try to find such a system.

The approach that has evolved to support this kind of an organization is one where each separate part of the organization has it's own independent website. In addition to being extremely wasteful because of the energy that must be expended to maintain each site (not to mention the cost of independently hosting each site) such a structure over time becomes almost impossible to enforce any kind of consistency in look and feel, let alone messaging. It is also virtually impossible to leverage content across such an implementation.

Content Management to the rescue!

Well, not quite. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of a content management system, it is simply an approach to building websites that puts the content in a database, and dynamically presents the content in web pages as they are requested by the user. Examples of content management system driven websites are BLOGs, online bulletin board systems, online forums, etc. There are all kinds of content management systems available, from very expensive proprietary systems, to open source systems running on any platform or language imaginable. See http://www.opensourcecms.com for some examples of the kinds of systems that are out there.

The failing of most of these systems is that they were designed with a focus on the managing of the content, and not a focus on building a system that can serve a large distributed organization with its advanced security management requirements. Stay tuned to see how.

Hopefully this article has proven useful. If you would like to provide any feedback, or have other questions you would like to see addressed, you can contact us directly at feedback@azgaard.com.