e-Marketplace Pattern using WebSphere Commerce Suite, MarketPlace Edition Patterns for e-business Series

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2000 xiii

Preface

The Patterns for e-business are a group of proven, reusable assets that can

help speed the process of developing applications. The pattern discussed in

this book, Business-to-Business e-Marketplace Pattern, is an emerging

pattern that allows the development of e-Marketplace hub applications that

bring multiple buyers and sellers together in a way that provides efficient

electronic trading of goods and services. This pattern is a composition of

existing patterns, including the User-to-Online Buying pattern, the

User-to-Business pattern and the User-to-User pattern.

This redbook discusses subsets of the application topologies for the

Business-to-Business e-Marketplace Pattern. These subsets are used to

describe different parts of the full marketplace topology, and they represent

increasing levels of complexity, functionality, and integration in the topology,

ranging from a simple e-Marketplace to a fully integrated e-Marketplace.

Part 1 of the redbook describes the nature of e-Marketplaces and guides you

through the process of choosing an application and runtime topology to

deliver the desired market functionality. It then provides you with possible

product mappings for implementation of the chosen runtime.

Part 2 of the redbook provides a set of guidelines for building your

e-Marketplace application. These guidelines include discussion of

performance, technology options, application design, application

development, systems management, and security.

Part 3 of the redbook describes, using the standard sample application, the

functions available in WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition for

AIX. At the time this redbook was written we were using a pre-release version

of Marketplace Edition so our working example is not complete. We have

taken the approach of first describing our understanding of the facilities that

will be available in the released version of WebSphere Commerce Suite,

Marketplace Edition for AIX, and then giving some detail of the features we

were able to implement and test.

The team that wrote this redbook

This redbook was produced by a team of specialists from around the world

working at the International Technical Support Organization, Raleigh Center.

Bill Moore is a WebSphere Specialist at the International Technical Support

Organization, Raleigh Center. He writes extensively and teaches IBM classes

xiv e-Marketplace Pattern using WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition

on WebSphere and related topics. Before joining the ITSO, Bill was a Senior

Aim Consultant at the IBM Transarc lab in Sydney, Australia. He has 16 years

of application development experience on a wide range of computing

platforms and using many different coding languages. He holds a Master of

Arts degree in English from the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New

Zealand. His current areas of expertise include the VisualAge family of

application development tools, object-oriented programming and design, and

e-business application development.

Mitch Fielding is an e-Business Specialist at Solution 6, an IBM Business

Partner based in Sydney, Australia. He has 10 years’ experience in software

development and consulting in private and government industry sectors - two

years of which have been in the e-Business arena using WebSphere-based

technologies. He has previously written on servlet and JSP programming

using VisualAge and WebSphere Studio.

Charles Wilson is an e-Business IT/Architect in IBM USA. He has 15 years

of experience in software development and consulting in the private sector

and with the US government. He has been designing and building Internet

and Intranet sites for five years and specializes in e-Business, Java, Linux,

and high-performance computing. He holds a degree in Computer Science

from Texas Central College.

Ara Avanesian is an Advisory I/T Professional in IBM Canada. He has five

years of experience in application development and system design in finance,

retail and government industry sectors. As part of IBM Canada e-Business

Services and Consulting he specializes in WebSphere-based technologies.

He holds a degree in Computer Science from York University.

Pieter Viljoen is a Technical Sales Specialist for the western region in the

United States. He has 11 years of experience in technical support, sales,

marketing and solutions development in the field. His areas of expertise

include technical solutions development, programming and system analysis

and design.

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Figure 1. The authors

Thanks to the following people for their invaluable contributions to this

project:

Margaret Ticknor

John Ganci

Linda Robinson

International Technical Support Organization, Raleigh Center

Vibby Gottemukkala

Richard Goodwin

Scott Smith

Charles Shan