Laurent D. Hasson

A platform for business-to-business sell-side, private exchanges and marketplaces

E-commerce, in terms of the monetary value of transactions, is heavily skewed toward business-to-business (B2B) commerce. Numerous B2B sites are already in existence, providing a fairly rich set of functionality for enabling simple or sophisticated trading of goods and services. In the coming years, we expect a strong growth in many kinds of B2B sites for trading, procurement, and sales. In this paper, we present a B2B platform suitable for various kinds of businesses such as large sellers, dealers, distributors, private exchanges, marketplaces, and procurement hubs. We present business scenarios, describe our design criteria, and present the architecture for the B2B platform. We discuss two major IBM offerings within the WebSphere® Commerce Suite product-- WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition (MPE) and WebSphere Commerce Business Edition (BE)--that are based on this platform. We also present some experiences with and deployment of MPE for private exchanges and marketplaces.

On demand web-client technologies

This paper describes a comprehensive set of technologies that enables rich interaction paradigms for Web applications. These technologies improve the richness of user interfaces and the responsiveness of user interactions. Furthermore, they support disconnected or weakly connected modes of operation. The technologies can be used in conjunction with many Web browsers and client platforms, interacting with a J2EE™ server. The approach is based on projecting the server-side model-view-controller paradigm onto the client. This approach is firmly rooted in the Web paradigm and proposes a series of incremental extensions. Most of the described technologies have been adopted by IBM server (WebSphere®) and client products.