An introduction to e-commerce and distributed applications

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	Time: 8 hours Level: Advanced

	Introduction Introduction Resource This unit examines 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...

	1 Distributed systems 1 Distributed systems Resource The past four years have seen an amazing growth of interest in distributed systems which address the business needs of companies and which use network technology – primarily the technology employed in...

	2 Commerce and the internet 2 Commerce and the internet Resource 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...

	3 E-commerce applications 3.1 An example – supply chain management Resource Before looking at the wide variety of e-commerce application areas that have flourished over the last decade in more detail, it is worth looking at one which may not be familiar to a reader, but which... 3.2 E-tailing Resource The next example is probably the one that you expected me to introduce first: that of selling goods over the internet. However, I deliberately introduced supply chain management first since it is an area... 3.3 Procurement Resource The term procurement is used to describe the purchase of goods and services which are not directly used in the main business of a company. For example, a car manufacturer will procure stationery for its... 3.4 Auction sites Resource These are sites on the web which run conventional auctions. There are two types of auction: those that are carried out in real time, where participants log in to an auction site using a browser at a specified... 3.5 Other commercial websites Resource So far I have detailed e-commerce applications which are connected with very large organisations; to conclude this section it is worth looking at a number of smaller applications, many of which are distinguished... 3.6 Search engines Resource The web contains a huge amount of material. Finding specific information is a huge problem; even in the early days of the internet this was a problem which threatened to slow the growth of the net. Fortunately...

	4 The facilities of the internet used to support e-commerce and e-business systems 4.1 The World Wide Web Resource The aim of Section 4 is to describe briefly the main facilities of the Internet that are used to support e-commerce and e-business systems. 4.2 FTP Resource The acronym FTP stands for the File Transfer Protocol. It provides the facility whereby files can be downloaded into a computer from another computer in the internet. Although there are a number of utilities... 4.3 Email Resource This is one of the most ubiquitous technologies on the internet and, along with the World Wide Web, is the most used. When you write an email you use a program known as a mailer. When the email is completed... 4.4 Newsgroups Resource A newsgroup is a collection of internet users who are interested in a particular topic. The topic may be a technical one, for example the LINUX operating system, or a recreational one such as fly fishing.... 4.5 Mailing lists Resource Mailing lists are groups of users who have some interest in common, for example they may all be network professionals. Such a list is used by organisations or individuals to inform the members of topics...

	5 Issues and problems affecting internet, e-commerce and e-business development 5.1 Legacy technology Resource The aim of Section 5 is to examine some of the issues and problems which affect the devekopment of Internet, e-commerce and e-business applications. 5.2 Security and privacy Resource The internet is not a particularly secure place. There are two aspects to this: the first is that information is widely published throughout the internet which can be used for criminal and near-criminal... 5.3 Programming and abstraction Resource In the early 1990s programming an application for the internet was a tough proposition. I remember that I once had an application which required a very simple form of communication with another application... 5.4 The speed of development Resource E-commerce consultants speak of a web year. This is the time which it takes to bring to implementation a conventional system that would normally take a calendar year to develop. Current estimates are that... 5.5 Structure and data Resource A problem that is being increasingly experienced by internet companies is the fact that they have to interchange a large amount of data and that such data inherently lacks structure. For example, HTML... 5.6 Problems with transactions Resource A distributed transaction is a sequence of operations applied to a number of distributed databases which form a single functional step. For example, a transaction which moves an amount of money from a... 5.7 Design Resource Designing a distributed system can also be a problem, for example the fact that computers in a distributed system are joined by communication media which can stretch over thousands of miles provides an...

	6 A distributed system 6.1 The archityecture of a typical e-commerce system Resource Before finishing this unit it is worth looking at the architecture of a typical e-commerce system in order to see some of the technologies. This is followed by details of a real application which I shall... 6.2 The application Resource The first application I shall describe is that of an online bookseller. Such a book sales system would carry out a number of functions: 6.3 The architecture Resource The architecture of the system is shown in Figure 4. It consists of a number of components. The most important of these is the web server. This communicates with browsers used by customers. 6.4 The Sydney Olympic Games system Resource IBM was responsible for the computer systems which were used in the 2000 Olympic Games. There were a number of components to the system, these included:

	7 Internet business models 7.1 What is a business model? Resource The aim of this section is to look at some of the business models which have been used to drive internet applications. A business model is a high-level description of an application type which contains... 7.2 Business models Resource This is the most ubiquitous form of commerce on the World Wide Web. It involves a company presenting a catalogue of its wares to internet users and providing facilities whereby such customers can purchase...

	8 Further reading 8 Further reading Resource There are a large number of books that have been written on e-commerce, many of which are of varying quality. I have found three useful. The first is by Kalakota and Whinstone (1997). It is an excellent...

	References and Acknowledgements References Resource Acknowledgements Resource