Electronic commerce infrastructure

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is all the rage these days. About 100 million users and at least one million businesses already reachable via the Internet have made it that way. This critical mass compares to the market economy of North America, Japan or Europe. But doing business electronically means shifting critical business processes to open networks. It also means connecting back-end business applications in a secure and flexible way. Is there anything preventing the continued proliferation of this economy? Yes. A software infrastructure that allows all participants to carry out business transactions is still lacking. As a result, specialty market reference architectures are still needed to help identify important players, roles and relationships of the various markets and their participants. These architectures define the major components these participants require to carry out business transactions in that particular market. By defining interfaces and the semantics of the involved services, reference architectures provide patterns for software developers. These patterns help the software developers to implement coherent pacts to the overall electronic market system.