A task-oriented reconfigurable software architecture for e-commerce document exchange

Within the area of data transfer and messaging over the World Wide Web, there coexists a growing number of protocols that fulfil different tasks, however an accepted standard for all tasks does not exist. For applications in areas like e-procurement, this becomes an even more challenging problem, as they are confronted with rapidly changing technology standards as well as with changing messaging requirements. To overcome this problem, we present a reconfigurable architecture that not only allows to exchange protocols according to future needs of Web based e-commerce systems, but also allows to specify for each individual task, which protocol of a given protocol stack is used to fulfil this specific task. Thereby, our architecture allows for an individual mapping of tasks to protocols or even protocol independent software components that are most appropriate to fulfil these tasks. This result in a highly reconfigurable stack of task oriented modules where modules can be exchanged, removed, and integrated easily and independently. Therefore, we consider our architecture to be a significant step towards a reconfigurable software architecture for Web based e-commerce systems that can easily be adapted to both, currently unknown future application needs and future software components.