Object-Oriented Architectures for Electronic Commerce Concepts and Development Heuristics

The Web is exciting because of its potential to be ubiquitous soon. So electronic commerce will be tightly coupled to this medium and people will buy goods over the Internet instead of going to stores. The precondition for electronic commerce is that existing information systems are enhanced to support the Web. Another exciting opportunity will be the distribution of software components over the Internet. Though software components comprise just one specific product, this will have a profound impact on how software systems wil be built in the future. The paper sketches the key role of semifinished object-oriented architectures (= frameworks) for both, the enhancement of existing information systems and plug-and-play componentware. It includes a discussion of the concepts underlying framework technology and of some design heuristics known so far.