FRAMEWORKS AND ARCHITECTURES, Slides of Fundamentals of E-Commerce

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FRAMEWORKS AND

ARCHITECTURES

Prepared by Nick Gachui, BSc. Computer Science (JKUAT), MSc. Software

Engineering (JKUAT).

Learning objectives In this topic you will learn,

• (^) what are the main actors and stakeholders in the area of E-Commerce,
• (^) how the fundamental sales process and his 7+1 process steps work,
• what are the technological elements, which are characteristic for E-

Commerce and have enabled the big success of E-Commerce.

Contd…

• (^) According to the specific nature of the interacting partners we talk about “X2Y business” where X and Y belong to the above-mentioned categories. We only talk about X2Y business if there is an interchange of goods or services and money. The supplier provides goods or services, the customer, be it a consumer or another business, has to forward an appropriate amount of money to the supplier. This is done on the base of a contract (be it a written or an oral contract). There are typically mentioned relationships (see figure 1):
  • (^) C2C: “Consumer to Consumer”.
  • B2C: “Business to Consumer”.
  • (^) B2B: “Business to Business”.
  • (^) G2C: “Government to Citizen”, part of E-Government.
  • G2B: “Government to Business”, part of E-Government.
  • (^) G2G: “Government to Government”, part of E-Government.

Figure 1: Business Relationships (B = Business; C = Customer/Citizen; G = Government)

PRIMARY PROCESS

• (^) In general we will denominate the provider of goods or services as the supplier and the receiver of goods or services as the customer. Sometimes third parties are involved, e.g. shipping agents, which are denominated specifically.

The steps and sub-steps of the primary process, including the responsible party (see figure 2), are:

• (^) Information step:
  • Search for products and services: by the customer,
  • (^) Search for potential suppliers: by the customer, о Search for potential customers: by the

supplier, о Communicate an offering: by the supplier,

• Communicate a need: by the customer,
• Initiation step:
• (^) Get into contact: either by the customer or by the supplier,
• Request for delivery or service: by the customer,
• (^) Offer for delivery or service: by the supplier,
• (^) Assess supplier: by the customer,
• Assess customer: by the supplier,

Contd… о (^) Proceeding for physical services:

• (^) Build and maintain service fulfilment capability: by the supplier,
• (^) Come together physically because customer must be an active part in service delivery: by the supplier and the customer,
• (^) Define service levels: by the supplier, possibly after a negotiation with the customer,
• (^) Add service level agreement to contract: by the supplier,
• (^) Accept service fulfilment: by the customer,
• (^) Approve contract fulfilment to authorize billing: by the customer,

о (^) Proceeding for digital goods:

• (^) Send goods to the customer via the net or provide for download: by the supplier,
• (^) Protect goods against unauthorized access : by the supplier,
• (^) Accept delivery or confirm successful download: by the customer,
• (^) Approve contract fulfilment to authorize billing: by the customer,

Contd…

Proceeding for digital services:

• (^) Provide service via the net: by the supplier,
• (^) Define service levels: by the supplier, possibly after a negotiation with the

customer,

• (^) Add service level agreement to contract: by the supplier,
• (^) Initiate service provision: by the customer,
• (^) Accept service fulfilment: by the customer,
• (^) Approve contract fulfilment to authorize billing: by the customer,

о Proceeding for information:

• (^) Like digital goods,

SECONDARY PROCESS

• (^) The secondary process (see figure 3) can be sub-divided into
  • (^) Internal process control,
  • (^) Communication to the customer:
    • Tracking & tracing: by the supplier or the shipping agent,
    • (^) Inform about order processing status: by the supplier,
    • Announce delivery time: by the supplier or the shipping agent.

TECHNOLOGICAL ELEMENTS

Figure 4: Technologies for E-Commerce

TCP/IP is part of the following 4-layer protocol: Layer 1: Local network/network access

• (^) This layer corresponds to the first layer (physical layer) and the second layer (data link) of the ISO/OSI seven layer model (ISO = International Standards Organization, OSI = Open Systems Interconnection). Available technologies are:
  • (^) FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface), which has a ring structure, provides a transmission rate up to 100 MBit/sec and is defined in the ANSI standards X3T9.5, X3.139 and X39.5 (ANSI = American National Standards Institute),
  • (^) Token Ring , which also has a ring structure, in which the token-possession grants the possessor permission to transmit on the medium, is an advancement of FDDI and is defined by the standard IEEE 802.5 (IEEE = Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers),
  • Ethernet , which has the widest propagation now, actually is the primary technology and provides transmission rates up to 10 Gigabit/sec (Access is carried out via CSMA/CD = Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection; technology is based on standard IEEE 802.3).

Contd… Layer 2: Internet (IP)

• This is the address layer, corresponding to the third layer (network layer) in the ISO/OSI seven layer model. The layer is independent from the physical transportation medium. Within IP each destination has a unique address, globally administered by IANA (IANA = Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). - (^) IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet, and the first version was deployed in 1981. IPv4 is described in the IETF publication RFC 791 (September 1981; RFC = Request for Comment; IETF = Internet Engineering Task Force), replacing an earlier definition (RFC 760, January 1980). - IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by IETF to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.

Contd…

• (^) HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) HTTP functions as a request-response protocol in the client-server computing model. A Web browser, for example, may be the client and an application running on a computer hosting a website may be the server. The client submits an HTTP request message to the server. The server, which provides resources such as HTML files and other content, or performs other functions on behalf of the client, returns a response message to the client. The response contains completion status information about the request and may also contain requested content in its message body.
• FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
• (^) FTP is a standard network protocol used to transfer computer files from one host to another host over a TCP- based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client- server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and the server. FTP is documented in RFC 959 (1985).
• (^) SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
• (^) SMTP is an Internet standard for electronic mail transmission. First defined by RFC 821 in 1982, it was last updated in 2008 with the Extended SMTP additions by RFC 5321, which is the protocol in widespread use today.

Contd…

• (^) WWW (World Wide Web)
• (^) WWW is an open source information space where documents and other Web resources are identified by URLs (URL = Uniform Resource Locator), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. It has become known simply as “the Web”. WWW is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet.
• Berners-Lee’s breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book “Weaving The Web”, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:
• • (^) a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as uniform resource locator (URL) and uniform resource identifier (URI),
  • (^) the publishing language HyperText Markup Language (HTML),
  • (^) the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).