Component-based E-Commerce: Assessment of Current Practices and Future Directions

Component-based e-commerce technology is a recent trend towards resolving the e-commerce challenge at both system and application levels. Instead of delivering a system as a prepackaged monolith system containing any conceivable feature, component-based systems consist of a lightweight kernel to which new features can be added in the form of components. In order to identify the central problems in component-based e-commerce and ways to deal with them, we investigate prototypes, technologies, and frameworks that will transcend the current state of the practice in Internet commerce. In this paper, we first discuss the current practices and trends in component-based electronic commerce based on the International Workshop on Componentbased Electronic Commerce. Then, we investigate a number of research issues and future directions in component-based development for electronic commerce.