A method and apparatus for conducting business via the worldwide Web in which business programming is isolated from Web user interface programming. In accordance with the invention, a gateway servlet interfaces between a consumer's browser's software, a plurality of Java beans, Java Server Pages, and a e-business retailer's back-end business software running, for instance, on a separate mainframe. The gateway servlet receives input information from the consumer and instantiates and populates a Java bean that confirms that the input data has been entered correctly. It then forwards the verified input data the back-end software for business processing. The back-end software returns a user interface record object to the gateway which then instantiates and populates another Java bean to format the data. The gateway then invokes a Java Server Page that interfaces with the Java bean in order to generate a HTML page to be returned to the user based on the user input information and the business back-end processing thereof.