Billy B. L. Lim

Consumer-based m-commerce: exploring consumer perception of mobile applications

With m-commerce still in its infancy, there have been relatively few attempts to systematically explore the opportunities and challenges posed by m-commerce. This study is an early attempt aims to provide empirical data on consumer perception of mobile applications. This paper first examines the value proposition of mobility. It then investigates m-commerce operation modes and potential consumer-based applications. A consumer perception survey was conducted to reveal the attributes that are perceived as important by consumers for making m-commerce choices. Results provide company executives with useful insights into m-commerce applications and their commercial potentials.

Web Services: An Analysis of the Technology, its Benefits, and Implementation Difficulties

Abstract Software reuse and systems interoperability have been primary goals of many IT organizations, especially those that rely heavily on computer networks. Object-oriented (OO) technology has been utilized to accomplish these goals with relative success over the years; but there are many hurdles that OO technology could not overcome. One of them is due to lack of standards. An object developed in one vendors technology cannot easily communicate with anothers. Another difficulty is that the majority of software applications reside behind firewalls – security barriers that restrict communication between networks. Web services, self-describing services that can easily be consumed over the Web, is the latest trend in the industry to address the problems identified above. Web services enable a group of related applications to be programmatically invoked over the Internet. They are rapidly emerging as important building blocks for business integration. Companies are finding important Web service applications in B2B, B2C, and enterprise application integration solutions. This article reviews the technical underpinnings of Web services and discusses their business opportunities and potential benefits. It also assesses the challenges and implementation difficulties of the technology.

Measuring e‐commerce efficiency: a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach

As a result of the dot‐com collapse and the slowdown in the economy, the flood of venture capital dollars for e‐commerce has evaporated. E‐commerce companies have been enforced to review their business performance. E‐commerce efficiency has been touted to be a critical component that can assist a company in its strategies to become successful. This study proposes a model for evaluating e‐commerce efficiency using data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The model includes not only financial and operational measures, but also e‐commerce specific measures. An illustrative example demonstrates that the DEA model can not only effectively reflect the relative efficiency of e‐commerce firms but also identify their potential efficiency problems. Management can, therefore, take the right remedial actions.

Evaluating the technological characteristics and trust affecting mobile device usage

The Technology Acceptance Model was extended to explain the acceptance of mobile devices. The technological characteristics of mobile devices and trust were hypothesised as predictors of mobile device usage. The study of 212 mobile users indicate that device service reliability does influence perceived trust, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness, while device interface quality only predicts perceived trust and perceived ease of use. The findings suggest that trust and mobile device characteristics play essential roles in the acceptance of mobile device usage, and need to be incorporated into the design of future mobile commerce applications.

Teaching Web development technologies in CS/IS curricula

The advent of the World Wide Web changes the way we do things. It also greatly changes how computer software are built. While this profound evolution of software development has caused many in the software industry to change their way of developing software, it has not caused many in the academics to change their way of teaching computing. This paper describes a course that teaches web development technologies. The contents of the course, the experience gained, and related educational resources are presented.

The impact of next generation XML

Over the past few years, business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐commerce has grown exponentially. To conduct B2B e‐commerce, companies need a common language. HTML is not suited for this task, because it defines only the information’s format instead of its meaning. XML has been shown to not only be the most natural evolution of Web technologies to support modern applications such as e‐commerce, but also be the preferred means of making legacy data available to users via the Internet. Since XML is still in its infancy, early versions of XML do not include the fundamental feature of specifying and enforcing integrity constraints, which is critical to making XML a viable and long‐term approach for representing data over the Web. In other words, XML provides little support to make sure the data being represented satisfy the business rules specified. Reviews the trends in B2B e‐commerce and discusses the critical needs to support constraints and the integrity of data, which are very important to the success of B2B e‐commerce. Also presents the next generation of XML technology for representing constraints. Concludes with a summary of the impact of the new XML on B2B e‐commerce and its future challenges.

On integrating web services from the ground up into CS1/CS2

Web services technology is a burgeoning technology that has received tremendous amount of attention in the software industry in recent years under the broader umbrella of service-oriented architecture (SOA). While Web services have been incorporated in many industries in the market place in the last few years, they are only beginning to appear in the academia, primarily in upper division and graduate CS curricula. In this paper, we share our belief that the Web services technology can and should be introduced early in a CS curriculum. We describe a number of scenarios that Web services can be integrated into CS1/CS2 to make them more interesting and more importantly, make the students better prepared for upper division classes and for the industry upon graduation. These scenarios can be incorporated without compromising the core materials presently covered in many CS1/CS2 sequence.

Incorporating WS‐Security into a Web services‐based portal

Software reuse and systems interoperability have been the primary goals of many IT organizations as a means to curb software cost. While there were spots of success over the years, the state of the industry with respect to reuse and interoperability is still lagging. Two main reasons are: lack of standards and security barriers imposed on many software systems. Web service, a self‐describing service that can easily be consumed over the Web, is the latest trend in the industry to address the problems identified above. Based on XML and HTTP, Web services make it possible for involved parties across networks to communicate and produce/consume a service in a uniform manner. This paper describes the incorporation of Web services security (WS‐Security) into a project that integrates Web services into a Web‐based college admission portal system. With the incorporation of WS‐Security, the project showcases how the aforementioned problems together with security issues can be addressed using some of the burgeoning Web services technologies.

DBTool: a graphical database design tool for an introductory database course

While it is advantageous for students in a database course to be exposed to a comprehensive project that spans the various phases of database design [SF 91, ACS 378], it is also observed that there is lack of support tools to help studenta in the database design process. This paper represents the experience that the authors had in a database course, from the both the student’s and the instructor’s pointa of view, and their attempt to solve some of the problems encountered by providing a tool to better aid the database design process.

Design and implementation of an e-Transcript system using Web services

Web services technology is a burgeoning technology that has received tremendous amount of attention in the software industry in recent years under the broader umbrella of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It is fast becoming an important emerging technology that utilizes the power of the Web to produce an integrated, interoperable solutions based on standard Web protocols that are easy to consume in a heterogeneous network. The paper showcases various Web service features and how they can be used for a secure online transcript transmission system. It discusses how the latest state-of-the-art technology can be used to solve the antiquated problem of transcript processing faced by many universities and students around the world presently. The experience gained and the possible future enhancements of the work are also described.