Exercise_Week 1

E-commerce, distributed applications and the Internet

Introduction

In the first week we examine the type of system which is described by the umbrella term ‘e-commerce’. A number of typical application areas are examined including retailing using the internet, supply chain management and online auctions. We look at some of the underlying technologies used to implement e-commerce applications, for example web technology. We also look at some of the problems which are encountered when developing distributed e-commerce systems, for example problems in ensuring that a system is kept secure from criminal activity. It concludes with an examination of a typical retailing system, how some of the technologies fit together and business models used in the internet.

Distributed Systems

There is no doubt that there is great demand for large-scale distributed applications. Indeed, tremendously expensive special-purpose distributed systems have been deployed and today are used extensively in the banking, airline, and telecommunication industries. The major barrier to supporting these, and even richer, applications on the Internet is the difficulty of designing, building, testing, and maintaining distributed applications using the tools that comprise the state-of-the-art today.

The guiding principles of distributed multi-tiered architectures like J2EE and .net / Windows DNA are Web computing; faster time to market; true interoperability; Scalability, reduced complexity; language, tool, and hardware independence; and lower cost of ownership.

The life cycle of a distributed application can typically be viewed as having four phases:

• Design phase
• Implementation and testing phase
• Deployment and utilization phase
• Maintenance and evolution phase

It is a collection of experiences and best practices that have been taken from real-world development engagements, providing development teams with access to shared experiences and a proven, repeatable process. The Distributed Application Development Process encompasses modern design principles and proven practices to facilitate the development task and provide developers with a blueprint for building robust and correct distributed applications.

E-Commerce and Internet

There are a number of ways in which companies can make money from the internet. Probably the best known way of making money is by selling some commodity; this could be a non-IT commodity such as a CD or item of clothing or it could be some piece of application software, a font, a browser plug-in or an operating system. Other forms of revenue rising are:

• Auction sites which auction items on the internet and make profits by taking some commission from the sales.
• Shopping malls where a number of e-commerce sellers congregate together on the same website; often these sellers will be related to each other, for example they may all sell luxury goods. The mall owner takes a percentage of their profit.
• Portals which contain massive amounts of material on a particular topic, for example a portal devoted to fishing. Such sites will contain thousands of resource links, tutorials and indexes. They will also contain links to merchants who sell goods associated with the portal topic. There may be a number of ways that the portal owner would make money, for example they could be paid by a merchant for each visit from the portal or the merchant may pay a flat fee for being included in the portal.
• Digital publishing sites which are effectively magazines on the web. They make profits in a number of ways including advertising and charging vendors for references to their website.
• Licensing sites which make some software available to other sites, for example search engines which allow a visitor to the site to search for material more easily.
• Community sites. These are like portals but involve the visitors more, for example a community site devoted to nurses might include a number of chat rooms which allow nurses to talk together in real time and swap advice. Money is made from such sites in the same way as with portals.

Such applications have changed the face of retailing, for example the fast communication of the internet has made bulk buying sites feasible and popular and has given rise to a number of novel commercial models.

Reference: Eustace, K. (2004). Lecture 1: E-Commerce, distributed applications and the internet [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from Charles Sturt University, Melbourne Study Centre