either of these two projects again, there is certainly potential for further work. A Golden 

Pages UDDI registry is a very good idea in principle but, for now, it is hampered by a 

lack of tools. 

Moving  the  Golden  Pages  database  into  a  global  UDDI  registry  would  present  several 

problems,  the  first  of  which  would  be  speed.  The  global  registries  are  currently  all  in 

experimental phases and none of the controlling firms have invested much in the way of 

bandwidth or server speed. As such, fast and reliable queries to any of these registries, be 

the  queries  directly  from  one  of  the  standard  web  interfaces  such  as 

http://uddi.microsoft.com

  or  through  a  specialised  Golden  Pages  interface,  cannot  be 

guaranteed.  

2.4 The  In House  alternative 

The decision was eventually made to go  in house  and design a self contained system 

from the ground up. This would have the advantage of being faster and more reliable than 

a  Java/JSP/UDDI based  system.  Instead,  the  system  will  use  a  combination  of  MySQL 

and XML databases controlled by a series of PHP scripts. My main reasons for opting to 

go  this  route  were  that  I  was  already  reasonably  familiar  with  PHP  and,  having  been 

introduced to SQL and XML at the start of this academic year, I was also eager to put 

some of this new found knowledge into action in a practical application. 

2.5 Technologies 

2.5.1 Server side 

The  system  was  implemented  on  Apache/MySQL/PHP,  a  very  popular  platform  for 

websites involving any amount of hypertext preprocessing. 

Apache is the currently most commonly used web server in the World Wide Web. It was 

written  in  1995  as  a  series  of  patches  to  the  then  dominant  NCSA  httpd  (Hypertext 

Transfer  Protocol  Daemon),  after  development  on  the  latter  had  stalled,  and  it  has 

remained at the top of the Netcraft Web Server Survey graph since early 1996. It is free 

software, maintained by the Apache Software Foundation 

MySQL  is  an  open  source  database  management  system  (DBMS)  owned  by  MySQL 

AB.  As  the  name  suggests,  it  is  a  relational  database,  with  its  own  version  of  SQL 

(Structured Query Language). It is currently the most widely used DBMS. 

12