A General eCommerce Platform with Strong International and Local Aspects

The objective of the Master’s project was to build a platform for e-commerce solutions. The goal with this platform was to facilitate process of building e-commerce solutions. An e-commerce solution is often a Web store that sells products or services. Today, when building a Web-store, it is a custom to use a database such as Oracle to store persistent data and a Web server to handle client requests. Most of the components of the Web store are often written in a server-side computing language such as ASP or Java. The requests to the database is translated into SQL-code (SQL is a standard language for databases). When constructing a Web store one has to know how to set up a database-structure and program the SQL calls. One also has to know how a web server works and how to handle transactions, security, stability and much more for both the Web components and the database components. Recently how ever, the concept of application servers emerged. An application server is a server with built in services for handling these kinds of difficulties when constructing a Web store. Application servers are very powerful and contain the latest technology in server-side application development. I chouse to build the e-commerce platform upon the J2EE application server developed by SUN Microsystems. The platform was to be general in that aspect that any kind of e-commerce solution could be built using the e-commerce platform as a base. Another feature of the platform was a built-in support for localization and internationalization