Hotel Reservation Systems on the Internet — Custom Design vs. Standard Software

The fast proliferation of electronic commerce applications on the Web has led to the emergence of a new field of research: Web Engineering or Web Information Systems Development (see e.g. the CACM special My 1998[3]). While Web Engineering initially was little more then the analysis of adequate tools for HTML or discussions about good HTML design, it has now become a full fledged area of software engineering with topics such as Web site modelling and maintenance, database integration, Java programming, choice of development tools etc. In many ways extreme contingencies for the development of Web software, such as time pressure, brief development and modification cycles, a trend towards throw-away software, highly volatile development environment in terms of tools, standards etc. may require specific methods and architectures. While their functional scope is expanding, Web application become more and more differentiated, in particular industry and application context specific.