A traditional problem with websites is that they are very much about the moment. A page exists in a single moment and once a user is done with it it’s gone. Session state, cookies, query strings and so on have all been attempts to address the inherent stateless (or in the moment) nature of the web. More modern web frameworks provide built in functionality for handling the age old problem of form data being lost once the form is submitted which developers previously addressed through many lines of code.

As websites become web applications and are increasingly more complex this problem becomes more acute in another area that is less thought about. I remember many years ago a client asking if they could receive an email each night of all the orders placed on their site during that day. This would seem like a simple task but in fact highlighted a major problem. How would this email be triggered? Dynamic websites, like their traditional static forebears, are made up of pages which only exist when a user views them. For any code on a website to run it must be part of a page that runs when a user visits it. The idea of some code running without user interaction fell outside of the website framework.

The early answer was to have a script file (such as a page) that was triggered by a timer running on the web server.  Windows Server for example offers scheduled tasks which could be used for this purpose but you needed a hosting company who offered the service (unless you had a dedicated server). Today we can solve the problem in other ways, for example it is very easy to write a windows service using .NET which runs independent of any website and carry out tasks at any time. Again, the necessary level of control over the hosting server is required though.

For many people the dedicated servers that make this type of functionality available are too expensive. This is now changing with the introduction of Virtualisation within the server environment. A lot has been made of VMWare lately and now Microsoft has just released Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008. Virtualisation brings the benefits of a dedicated server environment without the cost of dedicated hardware. This should greatly reduce the cost of dedicated solutions.

The result is that we can start developing outside of the traditional web technologies. We can introduce Windows Services or even desktop apps for handling many administrative tasks. Cleaning up data such as clearing unfinished orders out of a database can now be done away from the website and handled in the background. We can start to use workflow technologies such as Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) to create far more enterprise level applications. Finally we can start to leave the days of the stateless web behind and build richer, more efficient and more integrated applications.