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Sun Sea Sand and software
Browsing the Web and looking at exotic foreign locations where you could holiday is fun, almost a past-time we all indulge in at one at various times of the year.
Ten years ago such things were not possible, you had to make do with holiday brochures.
Around 2000-2001 you could browse, but booking could be a disjointed experience, sometimes frustrating if whole thing end with some error message saying try again later.
In the worst case your holiday was not booked, or you had booked two holidays instead of one.
By 2002-3 ".NET" Web technology was mature and available for web application developers to make the experience a lot smoother and a lot more reliable.
Around the same time .NET was released in the form of Visual Studio 2003 a new set of technologies were included called Web Services.
Not that many developers knew what they were or whether, once they did, if they could build reliable real world solutions given the bandwidth / availability issues that may prevent them being taken seriously.
Now in the U.K. its quite common for your little 10 year old cousin to have a 8MB link to their homes, meaning the infrastructure for consumming Web services is now in place.
Above is a picture of the U.K's first online content management system (CMS) specifically developed for creating Holidays.
There are many different types of CMS, this one allowed the user (travel agent)to create holiday packages, essentailly a flight and hotel constituted a simple package that was then displayed as one of the items you would find when browsing various Web sites for "holiday deals".
Before this and other such systems holiday packages could only be created on local area networks usually within one branch or at the "head office".