Walmart Online Shopping Information System

Walmart online shopping is an information system that was created to give customers the ability to shop at the Walmart stores without leaving the comfort of their own home. Whether it’s to get the hours of operation for the local store or to do all your Christmas shopping, the information system offers great convenience to its users. Also, the system does not focus on any one particular demographic. The users can range from teenagers to senior citizens. The primary function of the site is to give consumers a place to purchase store items without having to go to the actual store location. Therefore, some of the main features include the list of departments and the shopping cart.
Walmart.com is accessed by millions of users each day. In order for the system to work properly there are several hardware and software requirements. Unfortunately there’s no access to the server-side hardware and software requirements. However, some assumptions can be made. Walmart.com is basically a single application with subsystems, and like many other successful online businesses Walmart enables server farms. Walmart likely uses over a hundred servers and is said to have the second biggest and most powerful computer (or supercomputer) in the United States after the Pentagon. The website is served by Apache Tomcat. Additional requirements are Java, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft windows. Due to the large number of users accessing the website and the amount of data being stored, an extremely large amount of memory (RAM) and storage would also be needed.
Other possible requirements might include CGI (Common Gateway Interface), and filtering software. Walmart might use CGI so that it can run programs on the website. For example, the user will input information when ordering an item from the website, then the data needs to be processed by an application program. After the data is processed, a confirmation page will pop up. CGI is what will pass the data back and forth