Online Booking System for Dry Cleaners - Literature review Example

Online Booking System for Dry Cleaners This chapter will review a website that is similar to the onebeing designed in terms of its visibility and the security issues that they may be facing. It will also address the security concerns of thee website to be developed and how those issues will be tackled. Finally, it will talk about development languages which include PHP, MYSQL, HTML and CSS 2.1 A dry cleaning company that is online and has a similar system to which the client requires is the all washed up laundry and dry cleaning services. The company, which is located in Belfast and provides laundry, ironing, dry cleaning and shoe repair to residents of east, west, north and south Belfast; the system is user-friendly and easy to use for clients. It contains pages about the all washed up laundry and dry cleaning company, delivery service which includes the online booking service, prices, frequently asked questions, where to find them and the their contacts. In addition, they have also created pages that are in line with the services that they offer, these are; domestic laundry services, commercial laundry services, dry cleaning services, ironing services, tailoring and shoe repair service. The visibility of similar websites that are available online is not at its best since it requires a lot of effort before one can locate a laundry and dry cleaning business that is online. The most common places that an individual can find such businesses is in online directories and even in such places, services such as online booking are absent. Website Characteristics Link London dry cleaners The booking services requires one to tick the type of garment and service http://www.londondrycleaners.com/book.htm Lyn’s Iron Maidens The booking option requires an individual to enter his /her personal details and address. In addition, it also requires an individual to chose the type of service that he/she needs http://www.washandiron.co.uk/Order-Online.html Fantasy Cleaners The online booking page requires the client to enter his/her personal and address details and the time for collection and delivery of the clothes. http://www.fantasycleaners.com/107,booking.html Royale Dry Cleaning The page requires the client to enter his/her personal address and delivery and collection address http://www.royaledrycleaning.co.uk/bookings.php 2.2 Just like other websites, the most common security threat for such websites is hacking to steal the clients’ credit card information or other crucial data. According to Morgan (2006), the most common attack will be on SQL databases through the SQL direct injection attack; this injection attack occurs where the hacker gains access to a website and alter the databases either by deleting records in the datable or entire tables of data; the method they do this is through making use of the weak points in the website code especially the way the website code queries the database. However this can be solved through keeping databases error quiet; this means that when a hacker tries to detect vulnerabilities to exploit he will only find friendly messages that do not expose the vulnerabilities (Fernandez, Abrahão & Insfran, 2011, p 118). The other solution is to ensure all the data that is entered through form is checked and sanitized for any malicious content before being entered in to the database (Aggarwal et al, 2005, p97). Another security issues that is likely to face such a website is broken databases, which was realised after the slammer worm of 2003, which brought down thousands of databases in very few minutes (Litchfield, Anley, Heasman & Grindlay, 2005, p 154). This worm used a buffer-overflow vulnerability that allowed a hacker access to any database that the worm could discover’ this led to other related vulnerabilities such as command injections, which are being utilised by hackers up to date. The most common and used way of dealing with this problem is using security patches, however, this does not solve the problem completely as attacker are usually advancing their techniques forcing vendors to release new security patches regularly. Despite the release of these patches, most of the companies do not patch their databases therefore leaving them vulnerable to attacks by hackers (Ferrari & Thuraisingham, 2004, p50). The reason for lack of patching data by some firms is due to resources, time and stability of the patches. Thirdly leaked data is another challenge that is associated with web enabled databases, this is aggravated by the fact that most IT experts think that since databases are in the ‘back office’ and the network is secured from access online, then data transfer to and from the database does not necessarily have to be encrypted (Lorenz et al, 2006, p 212). The point these experts miss here is the network interface of their database, which can be used by an attacker to gain access to the database (Burnett, & Foster, 2004, p 88). To prevent this from happening, firms should strive to install transport layer security, which has negligible interference with the performance of the network while at the same time it is able to prevent individuals from gaining access to data that is being transferred to and from the database. The other way to avoid leakage of data is to ensure any data that is being transferred is encrypted 2.3 Human computer interaction can be defined as the study, setting up and devising of contacts between human beings and computers, this interaction involves both the computer side and the human side (Rosson, Sinha & Edor, 2010, p146). In designing the website for online dry cleaning, website graphics and the programming languages are crucial in ensuring the usability of the site by the clients. For an online laundry booking website, the computer or the website interface are supposed to design in such a way that the clients can be able to use the site without necessarily requiring any form of specialized training. 2.4 PHP development language is a server side programming language that is used for web development; this type of web development language is interpreted by web server with a PHP processor module which then displays the requested web page (Gilmore, 2010, p79). An advantage of this tool for web development is that it is usually free under the PHP licence; in addition, PHP can be rooted directly into an initial document of HTML format and at the same time be used on any almost all web servers and also as a standalone shell on any operating system. MYSQL is a computer programming language that is mainly used to manage open source databases; this web development tool allows the users to graphically design database structures. This language is used by some of the widely known large scale websites such as Google, Wikipedia and Facebook among others (Welling & Thomson, 2003, p 189). HTML which is an abbreviation for hypertext mark up language is one of the commonly utilised languages for building WebPages that are shown on almost all browsers (Musciano & Kennedy, 2010, p160). All websites must be designed using the HTML website in order to allow images and other contents to be include in websites, in addition, this tool for web development helps in creation of interactive forums; for an online laundry booking website, this is very important as it will enable the clients to give feedback and communicate with staff members. CSS, an abbreviation for cascading style sheets is a computer programming language which is used to describe the look and formatting of texts in websites, this tool is mainly used to differentiate between contents in a web document and how it is displayed; for instance the colour, layout, texture among others; this helps the users of the website to access the contents easily. This styling language uses some simple English keywords as rules to specify the various styles that are to be applied (Fan, 2011, p 44). A combination of these web development tools and languages will be the most effective to create an online dry cleaner booking system since each of them has a unique property that will be necessary to make the website user friendly and accessible as possible. The main reason for use of PHP is because it can be easily and directly integrated with HTML hence posing few complications in designing the website. MYSQL is one of the best web designing tools that improves the graphics of the website while CSS will help in making the website more accessible by separating the documents content and their formats. 2.5 All washed up company is the most visible dry cleaning company in the website with an online laundry booking service; however, its accessibility is not very user friendly. The security issues that are likely to face the website will be theft of clients’ data, but which with proper measures it can be avoided. Human computer interaction will determine how effective the online service will be; therefore the website has to be user friendly. The web development languages that have been chosen are to ensure that the website will be able to fulfil its purposes with minimal hitches. Screenshot   Screen clipping taken: 12/01/2014, 13:47     Wilton Green laundry services website has a provision for existing customers to give their addresses and ask for the services that they want. For new customers in addition to giving their basic address and identity, they are also required to provide details of their telephone numbers and city of residence. The site allows the users to select the services that they want, for shirts, they choose whether they want them to be hanged or folded, while for other services such as laundry and dry cleaning, the customer lists the items in the corresponding box. For collection or delivery, the customer has to choose one of the options and indicate the time that he would wish to collect or for them to be delivered; then there is also the mode of communication that the customer prefers. References Welling, L., & Thomson, L. (2003). PHP and MySQL Web development. Sams Publishing. Gilmore, W. J. (2010). Beginning PHP and MySQL: from novice to professional. Apress. Aggarwal, G., Bawa, M., Ganesan, P., Garcia-Molina, H., Kenthapadi, K., Motwani, R., ... & Xu, Y. (2005). Two can keep a secret: A distributed architecture for secure database services. CIDR 2005 Burnett, M. M., & Foster, J. C. (2004). Hacking the code. Syngress Publ.. Ferrari, E., & Thuraisingham, B. (2004). Security and privacy for web databases and services. In Advances in Database Technology-EDBT 2004 (pp. 17-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Litchfield, D., Anley, C., Heasman, J., & Grindlay, B. (2005). The database hackers handbook. Wiley. Lorenz, G., Moore, T., Manes, G., Hale, J., & Shenoi, S. (2001, June). Securing ss7 telecommunications networks. In Workshop on Information Assurance and Security (Vol. 2, p. 1115). Morgan, D. (2006). Web application security–SQL injection attacks. Network security, 2006(4), 4-5. Fan, Y. (2011). Cascading Style Sheets. Musciano, C., & Kennedy, B. (2010). HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide. OReilly. Fernandez, A., Abrahão, S., & Insfran, E. (2011). A web usability evaluation process for model-driven web development. In Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 108-122). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Rosson, M. B., Sinha, H., & Edor, T. (2010). Design planning in end-user Web development: Gender, feature exploration and feelings of success. In Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2010 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 141-148). IEEE. Read More