An Architectural Framework für Electronic Commerce Applications

Electronic commerce applications have been developed as a reaction to specific business opportunities. Their archi-tectures, so far, have been dominated by implementation concerns, without much consideration given to the cooperation model. In this paper, we describe an application independent framework to classify service interaction. It relies on four basic dimensions service topologies, cooperation models, implementation techniques, and quality of service. The framework is applied to some typical e-commerce scenarios. We conclude that most existing implementations rely on a tier-based client-server architecture disregarding the actual demands of the underlying application. The presented framework helps to identify the essential structures of applications and facilitates robust designs by successively looking at basic cooperation characteristics, different levels of abstraction and implementation issues.