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Page 203

CHAPTER 10

Electronic Commerce Server

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • What Is Electronic Commerce? 204
  • Is Electronic Commerce a Solution for My Business? 208
  • The Architecture of Oracle's Internet Commerce Server 211
  • A Peek at Some of the Third-Party Internet Commerce Server Cartridges 214
  • Oracle Applications for the Web 215
  • Encryption and Electronic Commerce 216

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What Is Electronic Commerce?

Electronic commerce is a characteristic of a networked economy, in which businesses can communicate and transact business through electronic means. Business communications determine the speed of business transactions, which ultimately convert goods and services into money. Therefore, the turnover time of capital will increase as electronic commerce replaces slower forms of business communication.

For instance, consider the manufacture of an automobile. The parts suppliers that provide parts to the automobile manufacturer want to exchange their items for money. The final product for them is irrelevant. If the automobile company throws the parts away, it is immaterial to the supplier. Likewise, the supplier of the supplier, a steel manufacturing company, only wants to sell steel. It is not relevant what form that steel ultimately takes: a car, a plane, or a toy. At each stage, the faster the business transaction can occur, the faster a company can convert its product into money.

Consider the consumer manufacturer, in this case the automobile company: It wants to exchange its product (a car) with the consumer for cash. In this case, electronic commerce assumes a more global, public, consumer-oriented role because the manufacturer wants to sell the product to the world market.

At first glance, electronic commerce over the Internet and the World Wide Web seems ideal for the car manufacturer selling to the public. It turns out that the business-to-business transactions between the steel company and the parts manufacturer can also see advantages to moving their operations to the Internet.

What electronic commerce means for this production-consumption cycle is simply that all suppliers and buyers involved in the automobile industry today have potential access to the Internet and the World Wide Web. This new de facto standard gives the supplier downstream and the purchaser upstream the ability to transact business over the Web.

Figure 10.1 shows a simple diagram of the automobile-manufacturing cycle.

Electronic commerce existed long before the World Wide Web in the form of EDI, Electronic Data Interchange. EDI provided standard "forms" of formatted data for industry. EDI required that both parties transmit data in a specific format. For example, the concept of a purchase order has a fixed format in EDI. Today, huge manuals define each of the thousands of forms used for different kinds of transactions. Populating data into these forms was accomplished with large mainframe computers and expensive EDI software. The cost of EDI software ranged from $5,000 for PC software to $250,000 for mainframe software. According to the Gartner Group, this 20-year-old technology is only used by one percent of businesses today.

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Figure 10.1.
The history of electronic
commerce.

Another drawback of EDI, as it exists outside the Internet, is that EDI companies sign up with a Value-Added Network (VAN) provider. These companies charge monthly fees and per- transaction fees that can be costly. These companies are mini- internets that handle the data of a few subscribing companies, moving information across networks or mailing disks of data between clients . Many now offer Web services, but is the price right?

With the Internet, new types of VAN providers appeared on the scene. They offered cheaper rates to simply send EDI information across the Internet and eliminated the per-transaction fee. After all, they were not the people maintaining the Internet. They could afford to charge less money.

Another advantage of this new form of EDI was that suppliers didn't have to register with a VAN provider as they did with the older systems. Many companies committed to EDI could never perform 100 percent EDI with every one of their business partners because some companies worked through different VANs. Along with that problem, EDI software was non- standard, customized, and riddled with compatibility issues that made it difficult for even two firms using EDI to communicate if their software and VAN provider differed.

With the new Internet EDI, businesses needed only e-mail to receive files. The EDI format became embedded in standard HTML language. The World Wide Web and the Internet brought with it a standard with which a company became compliant once they plugged in to the Web.

You might ask, "Why are you discussing only EDI? I can buy anything over the Web." You're right. EDI was just an earlier form of electronic automated commerce. Once the World Wide Web took off, companies began offering Web pages where a Web surfer could purchase almost anything. Soon the Internet medium began to handle both transactions between companies and companies (such as EDI) and transactions between consumers and companies.

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At this point, Oracle started the Apollo project, which later became the Internet Commerce Server (ICS). Oracle's idea was that instead of thick manuals of EDI standards for business-to-business transactions or new standards for business-to-consumer transactions, one could follow a standard baseline configuration for conducting business on the Web. Every company shouldn't reinvent the wheel for a common transaction; the concept of a cartridge lets companies plug in the software they need. Cartridges are programs written to perform a certain type of transaction.

With this architecture, users can have different databases and even different Web servers and still be able to purchase off-the-shelf cartridges that interface with each other and the Web Application Server. Instead of a standard such as EDI, which didn't specify any common hardware or network interface, the standard of cartridges is both data driven and software-interface bound. Cartridges eliminate the problem with current EDI software, which is not guaranteed to use the same transmission protocols.

To read more about the interface standard that accompanies cartridges, see Chapter 52, "Oracle Web Programming with Java and Perl." This new standard has the agreement of major Internet players such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and Oracle Corporation. This architecture defines the cartridge, and unlike EDI, guarantees compatible interfaces for all cartridges.

The Architecture of Electronic Commerce

Because the CORBA standard defines "object request," it has the object-oriented flexibility that lets you define classes of objects. With electronic commerce, you can have a large set of different objects in business, such as purchase orders, invoices, shipping forms, receiving forms, and so on. When data takes the form of objects, programs to operate those objects become methods , which is how a cartridge is defined and built. A cartridge consists of:

  • A program or set of programs and scripts written in a 3GL language using a language precompiler, such as PRO*C; a 4GL language, such as Oracle's PL/SQL; or a more modern applet-based language, such as Java.
  • A method or set of methods that provides a business function and can manipulate and handle a certain class of business transactions. A cartridge is a piece of software that plugs into the Oracle Web Application Server. Examples are the CyberCash cartridge, the CashRegister cartridge, and the VeriFone vPOS cartridge.

The foundation of the Oracle Internet Commerce Server is the broader Web Application Server. The Web Application Server is like a database of programs, which are cartridges, that perform specific business tasks . The Web Application Server contains a listener, which waits for incoming users to attach to your Web site with their browsers. It also manages the cartridges (programs) that the users need to engage in electronic commerce.

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Oracle Unleashed
Oracle Development Unleashed (3rd Edition)
ISBN: 0672315750
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 391

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