0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 2 / $ 1 7 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 2 I E E E M a r c h / A p r i l 2 0 0 2 I E E E S O F T W A R E 2 3 The real departure for Web-based enterprise applications is the possibility of wideranging accessibility. A system that might be deployed in-house at a manufacturing company can now be deployed to all the dealers of that manufacturer’s products. Indeed, it can be deployed to all the customers. In the past, such a wide deployment was a major hurdle. With Web-based technologies, providing external access to internal systems is as easy as publicizing a URL. Without doubt, the Web has significantly affected the users of computer systems, but what effect has it had on enterprise application designers? That’s the question we wanted to explore with this special issue. What things are the same, what things are new, and what things have changed in some subtle but interesting ways? The activities that people need to do to build Web software do not differ from those we do with any software. We still analyze requirements, design, write code, test, and deploy. Yet the pressures of building Web applications add some new variations of familiar activities. None of these changes are necessarily massive, but they suffice to suggest some new directions.