Designing and Implementing an e-Commerce System in IBM Environment

BME, Automatizálási és Alk. Informatikai Tanszék

The article and the corresponding presentation cover the design and realization process of a multilingual and multicultural electronic commerce system with both Business-to-Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) functionality. Beside creating a simple web-shop application based on this technology, the system supports building up an e-commerce web site using an already existing sales network and logistic background. Beyond the basic shop features the system helps to group consumers by defining sales channels depending on usage patterns. The CRM module enhances the efficiency of communication with customers.

The application is based on a three-tier architecture. Lotus Domino Server acts as database engine, which serves a Java Application Server in the middle tier. The presentation layer consists of Java generated HTML pages and the web browsers displaying the dynamic content.

Lotus Notes/Domino provides all the database functions, the administration and content management interface, together with the mailing services.

The Java application is responsible for the implementation of presentation-related business logic. The complexity of the application forced us to use a CASE tool: we chose StP and UML for this purpose, which made the development more transparent. The documentation and the design is clear and understandable, moreover, using the code-generator reduces time to market.

We use JSP technology for presentation. To improve effectiveness frequently queried records (i.e. language, products, etc.) are stored in memory cache. Products are presented in a structured form, for this purpose we use a catalogue without restrictions to its depth.

The database and the middle tier communicate via XML. XML is also used in the configuration files and in the communication processes with external systems, such as that of the retailers.