Architectural Framework For Electronic Commerce
Architectural Framework For Electronic Commerce
Architectural Framework For Electronic Commerce
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–A company becomes market driven by dispersing throughout the firm information about its customers
and competitors; by spreading strategic and tactical decision making so that all units can participate;
and by continuously monitoring their customer commitment by making improved customer satisfaction
an ongoing objective.
–Three major components of market driven transactions are
•customer orientation through product and service customization;
•cross-functional coordination through enterprise integration
•advertising, marketing and customer service.
2. Information Brokerage and Management:
–Information brokerage and
management layer provides service
integration through the notion of
information brokerages, the
development of which is necessitated
by the increasing information
resource fragmentation.
–Information brokers are becoming
necessary in dealing with the
voluminous amounts of information
on the networks. With the complexity
associated with large number of on-line databases and service bureaus, it is impossible to expect
humans to do searching. Information broken or software agents that act on the searchers behalf.
–Ex: In foreign exchange trading, information is retrieved about the latest currency exchange rates in
order to hedge currency holdings to minimize risk and maximizing profit.
–Brokerage function supports data management and traditional transaction services. This is
accomplished by tools such as software agents, distributed query generator, the distributed transaction
generator, and the declarative resource constraint base – which describes a business’s rule and
environment information.
3. Interface and Support Services
–This layer provides interfaces for electronic commerce applications such as interactive catalogs and
will support directory services – functions necessary for information search and access.
–Interactive catalogs are the customized interface to consumer applications such as home shopping.
–Directories operate behind the scenes and attempt to organize the enormous amount of information
and transactions generated facilitate electronic commerce.
–The primary difference between the two is that unlike interactive catalogs, which deal with people,
directory support services interact directly with software
4. Secure Messaging and structured Document Interchange Services
–Messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the clients or electronic
commerce applications, masking the peculiarities of the environment.
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–Messaging services offer solutions for communicating non-formatted data –letters, memos, reports –
as well as formatted data such as purchase orders, shipping notices, and invoices.
–Unstructured messaging consists of Fax, e-mail, and form based systems like Lotus Notes. Structured
documents messaging consists of the automated interchanging standardized and approved messages
between computer applications. Ex: EDI
–Messaging supports both synchronous and asynchronous message delivery and processing. It is not
associated with any particular communication protocol. With messaging tools, people can communicate
and work together more effectively.
–Due to lack of standards, there is often no interoperability between different messaging vendors
leading to islands of messaging.
–Security, privacy and confidentiality through data encryption and authentication techniques are
important issues that need to be resolved for ensuring the legality of the message based transactions.
5. Middleware Services
–With the growth of networks, Client–Server technology, and all other forms of communicating
between/among unlike platforms, the problems of getting all the pieces to work together became a
necessity.
–Middleware helps to mediate between diverse software programs that enables them talk to one
another. To achieve data-centric computing, middleware services focus on three elements;
transparency, transaction security and management and distributed object management and services.
•Transparency:
–Transparency implies that users should be unaware that facilitates a distributed computing
environment.
–Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing environment.
This gives users and applications transparent access to data, computation, and other resources across
collections of multi vendor, heterogeneous systems.
•Transaction Security and Management
–Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce model.
–At the transaction security level, two broad general categories of security services exist; authentication
and authorization. For electronic commerce, middleware provides the qualities expected in a standard
TP system: ACID properties.
6. Distributed Object Management and Services
–Object orientation is proving fundamental to the proliferation of network based application.
–Instance of an object in electronic commerce is a document. The term object is being used
interchangeably with document resulting in a new form of computing called document oriented
computing. The trend is moving from single data type documents to integrated documents known as
compound architectures .