This chapter is focused on moving information across the Internet. So, what do we mean by “moving information”? More important, what benefit is there in a business making use of this technology?
At a practical level, moving information means copying a document from one location to another. On a corporate intranet, moving information might mean information being transferred between different internal departments. The information might be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the latest sales figures or a text file of client information updates that are produced weekly by the company mainframe. Both these documents are stored in an HTTP server. The two departments can be in the same building or on opposite sides of the earth. The Internet Transfer Control can be used to create a solution that automatically ensures the latest copy of these files is available, perhaps checking for new copies daily, avoiding the need for someone to manually perform the transfer.
On the wider Internet, a company might want to retrieve the latest pricing information from a major supplier who has made the information available on the Internet. A medical supplies company in Sydney might update its price lists with information from its supplier in London. (A lot of companies are now disseminating information in this manner.) Again, the fact that a system automates this process would mean that the company can be confident that it always has the latest available information at hand, saving unnecessary rework later.
A boat rental company might want to retrieve the latest weather conditions for its particular geographical region from its local meteorological office by means of an FTP server. The boat rental company would then be able to print out the latest meteorological report for its customers, providing timely and important information.
All these scenarios have one thing in common—they involve copying a file from one location on the Internet to another. Let’s look at how using the Internet Transfer Control makes this task easy to achieve by means of the OpenURL method.