Case Study 1: E-catalogue development in XML

An investigation into a relevant client/server architecture of the Web for a small to medium enterprise (SME) may be useful, as you have a chance to demonstrate your current and newly acquired skills in e-business application development.

If you are to use XML as a core technology that support e-business initiatives, then any business application design should integrate XML and UML in your design or development work.

It may be useful to use a programming language (Java or Python) and XML to build an e-catalogue. I have proposed five stages of development for an SME:

1. e-brochure
2. e-commerce model B2B, B2C, B2E, C2C etc
3. e-catalogue
4. e-business transactions (applications)
5. Web services

An electronic catalogue, or e-catalogue, contains information about the products and services of a business and has two parts:
1. front-end (HTML, or XML plus XSS); and
2. the back-end product or service database. (Two main purposes of the electronic catalogue are on-line retailing and on-line marketing.)

The proposal or design should fit into the organisation’s total E-systems architecture planning. E-catalogue solutions commonly use XML (Java or Python) and its in-built SAX API. SAX is the Simple API for XML, originally a Java-only API. SAX (http://www.saxproject.org) was the first widely adopted API for XML in Java, and is a “de facto” standard. An alternative API is Document Object Model (DOM), which loads the XML “tree” into memory for processing. You have several frameworks – ZOPE, SUNone or Microsoft .NET - which all use XML as a core back-end technology for e-business. As an alternative, you can develop your own XML parsers in your favourite programming language – Python or Java - and use the SAX API or Document Object Model (DOM).
E-business XML or ebXML is a modular suite of specifications that enables enterprises of any size, and in any geographical location, to conduct business over the Internet. Using ebXML (http://www.ebxml.org/), an organisation can use a developing standard method to do e-business with B2B interoperability. How does ebXML compare with BizTalk at http://www.biztalk.com/?

There is a lot to learn and understand when using XML for e-business initiatives. Here is just a short list:
• DOM or SAX parsing of XML files
• Transforming XML with XSLT
• Querying XML with Xpath
• SOAP and distributed web services.