Directories and Portals
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Wikipedia-Article "Directories"
- This article is about the computing term. The Directory was also a government in revolutionary France from 1795 to 1799.
In computing, a directory, catalog, or folder, is an entity in a file system which contains a group of files and other directories. A typical file system contains thousands of files, and directories help organize them by keeping related files together. A directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory of that directory. Together, the directories form a hierarchy, or tree structure.
If you imagine the computer's file system as a file cabinet, high–level directories may be represented by the drawers, while lower–level subdirectories may be represented as file folders within the drawers.
Historically, and even on some modern embedded devices, the filesystems either have no support for directories at all or only have a flat directory structure, meaning subdirectories are not allowed; there is only a group of top–level directories each containing files. The first popular fully general hierarchical filesystem was that of UNIX. This type of filesystem was an early research interest of Dennis Ritchie.
In modern times in Linux and other Unix-like systems, directory structure is defined by either the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard or by [Modified Directory Structure].
The folder metaphor
The name folder, presenting an analogy to the file folder used in offices, is common on some operating systems such as Mac OS and, increasingly, Microsoft Windows.
Strictly speaking, there is a difference between a directory which is a filing system concept, and the WIMP metaphor that is used to represent it (a folder).
Note that the folder metaphor may be misleading with regard to things like file permissions on UNIX: To rename or delete a file you need write permission to the directory that contains the file. This is perfectly understandable if the directory is seen as a list of filenames but not if it is seen as a container (as folder implies).
In graphical user interface (GUI) or WIMP environments, folders are often depicted with icons which resemble physical file folders such as those of a file cabinet in an office.
See also
The word directory is also used in computing and telephony with a different meaning: a central repository of information related to management of a computer or a network of computers. This includes data on users, applications, hosts, network devices, security credentials and more. The directory, as opposed to a conventional database, is heavily optimized for reading, with the assumption that data updates are very rare compared to data reads.
As of 2003, the prominent directory technology is the Internet standards-track protocol LDAP, which is descended from the X.500 standard. Microsoft's implementation of LDAP is Active Directory. Most LDAP directories maintain information in a white pages schema which represents attributes of individual persons, groups and organizations.
The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is also creating standards related to the representation of information stored in directories for system and network management, and the protocols and APIs used to access it. The main product of these efforts is a Common Information Model (or CIM) for management.
See also: directory service, web directory.
Wikipedia-Article "Portals"
A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point or gateway to other resources on the Internet or an intranet. Intranet portals are also known as enterprise information portals (EIP). The building blocks of portals are portlets, which contain portions of content published using markup languages such as HTML and XML.
Portals typically provide personalized capabilities to their users. They are designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware, and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.
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Development of web portals
In the late 1990s, the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web browsers in the mid-1990s, many companies tried to build or acquire a portal, to have a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape Netcenter became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, and Excite became a part of AT&T during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies such as CBS.
Many of the portals started initially as either Internet directories (notably Yahoo!) and/or search engines (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, infoseek, and Hotbot among the old ones). The expansion of service provision occurred as a strategy to secure the user-base and lengthen the time a user stays on the portal. Services which require user registration such as free email, customization features, and chatrooms were considered to enhance repeat use of the portal. Game, chat, email, news, and other services also tend to make users' stay longer, thereby increasing the advertisement revenue.
Regional web portals
Along with the development and success of international web portals such as Yahoo!, regional variants have also sprung up which include country versions of Yahoo!, Canadian Content and Fireball.de among others. Some regional portals contain local information such as weather forecasts, street maps and local business information. Another notable expansion over the past couple of years is the move into formerly unthinkable markets such as Communist China.
"Local content - global reach" web portals have emerged from countries like India (www.rediff.com) and China (www.sina.com). Such portals reach out to the widespread diaspora spread across the world.
Government web portals
At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. In the United States the main portal is FirstGov.gov; in the United Kingdom the main portals are directgov (for citizens) and businesslink.gov.uk (for businesses). A number of major international surveys are run to measure the transactional capabilities of these portals, the most notable being that run by Accenture.
Enterprise web portals
In the early 2000s, a major industry shift in web portal focus has been the corporate intranet portal, or "enterprise web". Where expecting millions of unaffiliated users to return to a public web portal has been something of a mediocre financial success, using a private web portal to unite the web communications and thinking inside a large corporation has begun to be seen by many as both a labor-saving and a money-saving technology. Some corporate analysts have predicted that corporate intranet web portal spending will be one of the top five areas for growth in the Internet technologies sector during the first decade of the 21st century.
Some features of enterprise portals are:
- Single touch point - the portal becomes the delivery mechanism for all business information services.
- Collaboration - portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat, or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.
- Content and document management - services that support the full life cycle of document creation and provides mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control, scheduled publishing, indexing and searching.
- Personalization - the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.
- Integration - the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.
Most enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities to their users. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.
Enterprise portals may be referred to by the community they serve. For instance, an employee-facing portal may be described as a "Business-to-employee" portal, or B2E portal. Other enterprise portal classifications are "B2C" (business-to-customer/consumer), "B2D" (business-to-dealer/distributor), "B2B" (business-to-business/supplier), and "B2G" (business-to-government). Enterprises may develop multiple "B2x" portals based on business structure and strategic focus, but leverage a common architectural framework, reusable component libraries, and standardized project methodologies.
Emerging standards
- Web Services for Remote Portlets
- JSR168 (Portlet Definition Standard)