Web Commerce Security Design and Development

Distributed Computing: Adding E to Commerce

We have covered the basics of commerce and payment. Combining the two with a little bit of high-tech and distributed computing will get you exactly what you want: an operational, functional, scalable, and secure e-commerce infrastructure. In this section, we describe the technical foundation and key elements of distributed computing and how they contributed to the advent of online commerce. Let's start with the client/server model and make our way up to the more advanced cloud computing paradigm because that is how scalable e-commerce sites have started and ended up. This section is more technical in nature so fasten your technical seatbelts as the fun is about to start.

Client/Server

In the first chapter, we covered the basics of computing and noted its primary model: standalone computing in a single system. The standalone computing paradigm is usually monolithic. That is, a combination of all the steps necessary to complete a task is put in a program and once you run the program it handles the tasks in one piece. The next step in the computing paradigm is to identify generic tasks and devise components that are responsible for handling only those specific tasks. One model of achieving this goal is to divide the tasks into client and server tasks respectively. A client/server computing paradigm usually has the following constructs:

• Service: Client/server is primarily a relationship between processes running on separate machines. The ...