Evaluation Report for Assignment 2

Dear all course mates,

After I have gone through all exercises and workshops, I know the infrastructure of e-commerce systems much better than before. (Actually, I not only learn the e-commerce infrastructure but also, the applications.) Honestly, in my workplace, we have different teams dedicated to networking infrastructures and application developments. I seldom get to know the work of the other team. This time really gives myself an opportunity to understand something that I got to understand but I didn’t understand for years.

The ‘Ruby on Rails’ workshops have enabled me to be familiar with the design of a web application by using the MVC technique. I really admit that the MVC technique is a good approach to develop an application. Nowadays, the life of software or an application is getting shorter as the technologies are progressing very fast as well as the business environment. Therefore, we can’t afford to spend plenty of time designing the application. The technique such as System Development Life Cycle might not be applicable at the era.

Overall, I have benefitted a lot from this course and got very good exposure to the new technologies.

System Integration

The final topic is for group reflective study using the wiki tool in CSU Interact and a way for you to add a final reflective comment on systems integration and make your closing remarks to your Developers blog.

1.Choose ONE of the four ways to manage and develop integrated systems as listed below;

I chose "portal and service-oriented architectures (SOA)" to manage and develop integrated systems.

2.Summarise your understanding and describe its relevance (250 words max) in either your study at university or in your work environment;

SOA as an architecture relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. If a service presents a simple interface that abstracts away its underlying complexity, users can access independent services without knowledge of the service's platform implementation. Barry (n.d.) defines that ‘a SOA is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed. Today, SOA and Web services become very popular but it is not something new. The first SOA for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.

I just put aside the principles and technical requirements of SOA and only refer to the above definition when illustrating how SOA is adopted in the system design at my workplace. The essential applications including (email, financial system, intranet, office applications and documents) are unified on the web portal via a single interface illustrated in Fig.1.

Fig.1

It provides a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Behind the simple interface, there are complexities and depencies associated with the applications. Take Citrix as a good example, it is very different from other applications accessible through the portal. It actually takes you to an independent platform and users need to install the local Crtrix client prior to accessing it. From this perspective, it achieves the principle of 'loose coupling',

A small set of simple and ubiquitous interfaces to all participating software agents. Only generic semantics are encoded at the interfaces. The interfaces should be universally available for all providers and consumers (He 2003).

Of course, there are still many principles of SOA but I have no intention detail them here. I just attempt to put SOA in this context.

References
Barry, D n.d., Service-oriented architecture (SOA) definition, Barry & Associate, viewed 20 June 2009, <http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html>.

He, H 2003, What Is Service-Oriented Architecture, posted 30 Sep, O'Reilly Media, Inc, viewed 21 June 2009, <http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html>

M-commerce and the e-wallet: Innovation and mobile devices

Explore ONE of the problems associated with mobile technology or their suppliers, from 1 to 4 below:

1.What is meant by a location based service?

According to Wikipedia (2009), 'a location based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device'. For example, online game or SMS is one of the LBS applications that operates on handheld devices. However, LBS creates a privacy issue because it needs to track the location of the handheld device in order to provide the services at a particular spot.

2.Visit A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device Web site and search for information on WAP or SMS access to booking airline services. Do the same for WAP or SMS services in banking. How do both industries compare?

Both Airline and Banking are service industries. However, what can be doing in the airline services might not be applicable to the banking services. The information delivered by the airline company is normally less sensitive and personal like the schedule of the flights or airfares. Most of these information are public. The worst case is the itinerary of a person is disclosed. This should be far less harmful than disclosing a person's financial information.

3.Visit the W3C website and find the status of the VoiceXML project. When do you think it will affect business on the Web and what will its impact be?

The second draft of VoiceXML 3.0 was just published by W3C on 4 June 2009 (W3C n.d.). The W3C Speech Interface Framework is a suite of markup specifications. When the VoiceXML is standardised and mature, we can actually use our cell phones with the voice browser to do the following:

• Accessing business information, including the corporate "front desk" asking callers who or what they want, automated telephone ordering services, support desks, order tracking, airline arrival and departure information, cinema and theater booking services, and home banking services.
• Accessing public information, including community information such as weather, traffic conditions, school closures, directions and events; local, national and international news; national and international stock market information; and business and e-commerce transactions.
• Accessing personal information, including calendars, address and telephone lists, to-do lists, shopping lists, and calorie counters.
• Assisting the user to communicate with other people via sending and receiving voice-mail and email messages.

As a result, the voice data can be browsed and transmitted freely over the Internet. The e-commerce and m-commerce will become much more popular and increase the volumne of the transactions as users (even the peolpe with hearing and speaking impairments) can place their orders by phone calls or voice mails and the business organisations can manage these requests based on the infrastructure.

4.According to Nokia:

The Nokia One Mobile Connectivity Service provides easy and secure access to email, calendar, directory and more from a mobile phone, PDA, PC or fixed-line phone - take your corporate applications mobile.

Why is a company like Nokia – http://www.nokia.com – described as having end-to-end expertise?

References

Nokia Siemens Networks n.d., End to End Expert, Insight, viewed 19 June 2009, <http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/jp/Insight/end-to-end/>.

W3C n.d.,"Voice Browser" Activity, viewd 19 June 2009, <http://www.w3.org/Voice/>.

Wikipedia 2009, location based service, last updated, 10 May, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., US, viewed 19 June 2009, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service>.

Virtual business worlds and cyberagents

Search the Web for a site that uses a cyber character or cyber agent to host a business site. (If you create a successful cyber agent, you may be able to get large companies to use it to sell their products online.)

1.Differentiate the various types of software agents.

Software agents carry out tasks associated with software. For example, Windows Update notifies the user of any new updates to an existing system, downloading updates and even applying an update when it is received (Ince 2005, p.396). Other agents normally only collect information from websites with specific purposes. For example, Governments agents collect statistics or extract the updates from the regulations of government and News agents notify you the breaking news and news updates.

2.Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agents.

Like an auction agent, Bidder Edge, it scans auction sites onthe Web and continuously updates its catalogue of products. There are two ways that you can access the Bidder’s Edge Web site: first by scanning the various categories that are listed; second by personalising the Web site to your own interests, for example you can inform the site that all you are interested in is bidding for computer equipment and it will then only display items which fall under this category (Ince 2005, p.396). Certainly, it adopted the AI technique to identify you interests and the statistical technique to interpret your shopping habits. That's why it can recommend you the desired products or services.

3.Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

Amazon also employed similar techniques as mentioned above. It sends you the product update by email according to your shopping habits and interests.

4.Computing ethics and bot programming case study: rocky

a.Get an account username and password from the lecturer to LC_MOO at http://ispg.csu.edu.au:7680 and login to the Welcome Lobby.

b.Hold a 5-minute discussion with Rocky on a special topic. Commands: act rocky (start bot) hush rocky (stop bot)

c.Rocky is an ELIZA-like bot. Report your findings.

I logged in to the Welcome Lobby with the account 'train1' but couldn't get it to function as expected. But I know the bot was running because I attempted the second time and got the warning message, ' I didn't abort last time...'.

Searching mechanism

1.What is a spider? What does it do?
According to Ince (2005), Spider is normally used to describe software which harvests information for search engines and other allied sites, the image here being of a program which wanders around the strands of the Internet. It searches the information over the Internet in order to serve the following purposes:

• alert users when a particular of event such as a web site being changed occurs
• perform email address harvesting (the email addresses are sold to the business owners who will use them for sending bulk emails advertising a product or a service)
• use for search engine indexing

2.What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.
Meta tags are HTML tags which provide information about a web page. A meta-search engine just looks at the meta tags in the HTML of the web pages, especailly the home page of web sites. The results will be aggregate in a database which is being accessed by search queries. It can also search the keywords and gather the hit rate of web sites in order to evaluate the popularity of them.

The following are the popular meta-search engines.

• Brainboost is designed to provide specific answers to questions asked in natural language. Currently it only supports English.
• Dogpile fetches results from Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers.
• Info.com provides results from leading search engines and pay-per-click directories, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing.com, Ask, LookSmart, About and Open Directory.
  

3.How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?
You can just register my web site via the registration page of the search engine site. For example, you can just access the url to get your web site registered at Google.

http://www.google.com/addurl/

You can increase the number of hits on your website and therefore, the ranking of your site will improve accordingly. This can be achieved by the operation of bot. Just let a bot access repeatedly access your site.

References

Ince, D 2004, Developing distributed and e-commerce applications, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex, UK: Addison – Wesley, pp. 391-406.

Shopping cart specifications II

Differentiate between software systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Business-to-Business e-commerce programs and Supply-Chain Management (SCM) software.

CRM is a software system which is utilised by an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team (Williams 2009). Most likely, CRM would be accessed by the internal users including management, sales team and marketing department.

SCM software is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies. The ultimate goal of an effective supply chain management system is to maintain inventory tothe "Just-fit" level (TechTarget 2009). Since the whole supply-chain process is involved a few parties, SCM software will need to be accessed by those parties as well.

B2B e-commerce model is highly adopted in SCM system. This is because it requires every company in the supply chain to move quickly to process an order from a company which follows it in the chain and the old practices could no longer cope with the demands of the supply chain process. The stakeholders of the supply chain understand that they need to drop the old practices, (i.e. elimination of waste bureaucracy and indirect connections between companies). Instead, they require to get the online information and place orders within minutes. The volume of transactions is growing exponentially. The ideal here is for a company higher up in the supply chain to share its data with companies further down the chain (Ince 2004). The internet will be the platform for them to trade with one another and exchange the information. CRM is an internal system for an enteprise. Very unlikey, the client information will be shared with other companies and no direct trade will occur with other companies as well via the CRM system.

References

Ince, D 2004, Developing distributed and e-commerce applications, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex, UK: Addison – Wesley, pp. 6-8.

TechTarget 2009, Supply chain Management, last updated 24 Feb, TechTarget, viewed 20 June 2009, <http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid182_gci214546,00.html#>.

Williams, E 2009, Customer Relationship Management, lasted updated 23 Sep 2008, TechTarget, viewed 20 June 2009, <http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213567,00.html>.

Shopping cart specifications I

Develop the class diagram for the following shopping cart specifications:

A shoppingCart object is associated with only one creditCard and customer and to items in itemToBuy object. Persistent customer information such as name, billing address, delivery address, e-mail address and credit rating is stored in the customer object. The credit card object is associated with a frequentShopper discount object, if the credit rating for the customer is good. The customer can make or cancel orders as well as add and delete items to the shopping cart product. The credit card object contains the secure method for checking that the charge is authentic.