A Model - Centered Electronic

As electronic business transactions over the Internet become more popular, users and markets pose new requirements on both electronic commerce services and the applications implementing them. These requirements include support for multiuser business protocols, cooperation among users, and real-time (multimedia) interaction. The development of this kind of electronic commerce applications is a complex, costly, and time-consuming activity. Electronic commerce middlewares are an approach to support the development of these applications by providing a set of commerce-oriented functionalities that can be integrated into an application. Nonetheless, these platforms provide little support or guidance during the conceptual design of the application. This paper presents Jecom, a new approach to the development of distributed, cooperative electronic commerce applications. Jecom deenes an application reference model, based on roles and state transition diagrams; furthermore, the model is directly supported by a distributed middleware. This way, Je-com supports both the conceptual design and the implementation of complex electronic commerce applications. This integrated support reduces the time and costs of application development.