Designing Systems for Internet Commerce

Internet commerce—poised to revolutionize the way we do business—is quickly becoming a reality, with an exploding number of Internet business sites now being deployed. If you are thinking about taking the Internet commerce plunge, read this book.

Both comprehensive and practical, this book explains the fundamental principles of system design, reveals best design practices, and offers reality-based advice on implementation. It explores the common issues and critical questions to ask when planning a system for Internet commerce. In addition, it describes the key technologies relevant to electronic commerce and explains how to apply them using numerous examples.

The authors’ special focus is problem solving: They discuss the many potential risks, challenges, and stumbling blocks of Internet commerce systems and how best to deal with them. This information will enable you to anticipate and solve the problems you are likely to face, helping you implement an Internet commerce system that effectively ser ves the needs of your organization and its customers.

You will also find comprehensive coverage of:

• Consumer retail, business-to-business, and information commerce business models
• The critical issue of privacy versus merchandising
• Legal issues, such as taxation, copyright, and digital signatures
• Essential cryptography and security standards and methods
• Functional architecture and implementation strategies, such as the use of outsourcing, custom development, and off-the-shelf products
• The technological building blocks of e-commerce, including content transport technologies, CGI, Java™, ActiveX™, sessions and cookies, CORBA, SET, and COM
• Proven strategies for system design
• Creating and managing content
• Payment systems and transaction processing

In addition, the authors walk you through a full-fledged Internet commerce system design to illustrate all of these strategies, technologies, and functions in action. Moreover, the book demonstrates how to separate content from transactions, and offers an example of a scalable transaction engine.