My approach to teach e-commerce

Dr. John P. Abraham

Professor, UTPA

Major parts of the course• Overall goal: Teach how to make and maintain

money, business or personal.• What is e-Commerce, hardware architecture, e-stores,

e-advertising, e-payment, e-security, etc.• Business management: Planning, organizing, directing,

controlling, etc.• Financial Management: financial statements, investing,

leasing, buying, borrowing, etc.• Starting a business: business plan, sole proprietorship,

partnerships, corporations, Hiring, firing, payroll, tax liabilities and forms, inventory management, etc.

• Creating a website to sell, web-servers, shopping cart, scripting languages

Past and Present

• Past: 60% of this course consisted of web programming that led to creation of a shopping cart.

• Present: We have created two new courses called Web Programming and Applied Database Systems. I still require you to do the shopping cart using that knowledge.– Therefore, this course now focuses on mostly

business and money management and scripting.

Introduction to eCommerce

• E-commerce is a maturing industry.

• Growing pains

• Virtually every aspect of world business has been affected by it.

• E-commerce web pages sells more than $100 billion

Why take IT

• Such business applications of e-commerce require– Developers to create interactive web pages– Managers who understand the technology– Network administrators– Security professionals

So What’s E-commerce?

• Paperless exchange of business information– Email to e-funds.

• E-commerce seeks to automate business tasks:– Generation, processing, coordination,

distribution and reconciliation of business transactions through the use of Internet and other electronic media.

E-Commerce defined 2

– e-commerce refers to aspects of online business involving exchanges among customers, business partners and vendors. For example, suppliers interact with manufacturers, customers interact with sales representatives and shipment providers interact with distributors.

– also includes operations that are handled within the business itself. For example, production, development, corporate infrastructure and product management are aspects of e-business not included under the category of e-commerce.

Benefits

• E-commerce allows business to exchange goods and services immediately.

• Overcomes time and distance barriers.• Anyone can start a global business; which was

restricted to the very large companies.• New economy.

– A revolution in the rules of business driven by Internet connectivity. Business can processes information faster than products (a reversal).

Benefits 2

• Customers want access to products and services on a 24/7 basis (24 hours per day, 7 days per week).

• Personalization is achieved by tracking a consumer’s movement through the Internet, combining this data with personal information provided by the consumer and employing the compiled information to customize interactions with Web sites and applications.

• Businesses can now operate effectively without offices, because employees can communicate via phone, voice mail, fax, e-mail and the capabilities of the Internet and wireless Internet.

Web Technologies

• Here are some technologies recommended by W3C– HTTP 1.1 Hypertext Transfer Protool– HTML5 –Hypertext Markup language for

coding webpages.– CSS3 – cascading style sheet.– JavaScript– DOM – an API for accessing in-memory

webpage style

Web Technologies contd.

• PHP – server side active page programming language.

• mySQL – free relational database.

• DHTML-dynamic. For responsive interactive client side web programming.

• ScalableVectorGraphics, MathML, eXensibleMarkupLanguage.

• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Web Technologies contd.

• Web Services. See next several slides

What are Web Services?

• Applications execute across multiple computers on a network.– The machine on which web service resides is

the REMOTE MACHINE.– When clients uses a web service the class

and compile DLL are stored on the Remote Machine.

– Remote machines superior computing power can be utilized as well.

Web services

• promotes software re-usability

• promotes collaboration

• Web service is a class– Whose methods can be called by methods

running on other machines (see Simple Object Access Protocol in later slides).

– Requests and responses are transmitted via SOAP

Web services

• The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP

• Web services platform elements– SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) – UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and

Integration) – WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

SOAP• Simple Object Access Protocol is a

communication protocol for communication between applications, providing a format for sending messages via Internet which allows you to get around firewalls. Most firewalls do not restrict XML & HTTP traffic.

• When a program invokes a method, the request and all relevant information (parameters) are packaged in a SOAP message and sent to the Remote machine.

• The Remote machine (server) parses the SOAP message for Method and parameters.

• Response is sent as a SOAP message.

UDDI and WSDL

• Universal Description, Discovery and Integration is used like the yellow pages of Web services

• UDDI is a directory for storing information about web services and communicates via SOAP

• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is written in XML

• WSDL is used to describe Web services

Creating Web Services

• Visual web developer and the .NET framework used to develop web services.

• Creating a web service is known as Publishing.• Using a web service is known as Consuming.• The Web service has two parts: A proxy class

representing the web service and a client application that access the web service via an instance of the proxy class.

Web an overview

• 5 or 7 layer protocols

• IP address and Domain names

• Finding server IP address using DNS

• Domain registration - WHOIS

• Server Computer (Web server, IIS, Apache)

• Client Computer (web browser, explorer, firefox)

• Requests are sent

• Responses are received

• Communication takes place using HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol)

Client/Server

Web sites• Web sites that contain files

– Sites are static sites

• Websites that contain programs– Browser contacts the URL program name, the

webserver contacts program interpreter to interpret server side scripts and the database. The server then sends HTML string back to the browser.

• Web sites that contain applications– Interprocess communication is added.– Makes use of web services.

Web programming

• Web applications• Many scripting languages available• I assign these languages to different groups• I begin with Java Scripting also introduce

ASP.NET• Most web applications work with a DBMS,

mySQL, MSSQL, Oracle• Database server can reside on another

computer

Web browser

• Runs at the client site• Provides an user interface for the application• What is displayed is a web page• Each web page is identified by a URL and

defined by a web form • Web form is designed using HTML• The request to a server is sent using

Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)• A web page does not change depending on

the request is known as a static page

Client/Server Interaction using HTTP (Static)

• Into a web browser the user types an URL or clicks on a link pointing to a URL

• The web browser uses HTTP to send the request to the web server. The request contains several pieces of information, address of the requester, address of the server including the page requested (URL). Etc.– URL contains protocol, domain name, path and file name

• When the server receives the request it retrieves the page and sends it as the HTTP response.

• The browser receives the information and formats it and displays it.

Default

• If a document name is omitted, it looks for default.htm, default.asp, index.htm, or iisstart.asp.

Client/Server Interaction using HTTP (Dynamic)

• A dynamic page does not exist on the disk at the server, it is a form that contains server controls such as labels, buttons, or text boxes.

• The page is dynamically generated at the server• The request sent to the server contains the URL and

information entered by the user• When the server receives the request it looks at the

extension (htm, html, aspx, cgi, etc). The first two are static. Others are handed over to the appropriate application server to assemble the page as an HTML document.

• The browser receives the information and formats it and displays it.