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XML and XSL for managing ecommerce partnership
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Abstract
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Through partnerships and collaborative commerce, businesses can capitalize
on the unique aspects of the Internet to offer solutions that transcend traditional
business models. The Internet makes possible a radical paradigm shift with
the potential to transform insular supply chains and B2B exchanges and sub-optimal
approaches to online consumer distribution into open and dynamic marketplaces
or trading communities. Developing a platform to automatically manage relationships
between a set of actors in the e-commerce environment brings several technical
requirements. This presentation explains the environment, the requirements
and shows why and how the combined use of XML, XSL and Java is the right choice
of architecture. It also describes the issues the developers have to face
and what we expect to see soon in the XML standards
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Keywords
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Contents
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Introduction
The earliest business use of the Internet was the creation of informational
web sites, which typically involved merely reformatting existing marketing
materials to create an online brochure. This simple use of the Internet to
present static information was quickly supplanted by the first generation
of e-commerce merchants, such as electronic catalog businesses selling hard
goods such as books and computers to consumers. These approaches revolved
around generating transactions through click-through banner advertisements
or increasing traffic-based advertising revenues rather than capitalizing
on the unique aspects of Internet commerce. Furthermore, these first-generation
online businesses were stand-alone operations that replicated online traditional,
physical-world business models and competed based on price and breadth of
product selection.
These Internet business models historically have been successful in
generating online traffic and transactions. As the number of companies attempting
to conduct business online has increased, however, the web has become a highly
competitive business environment and crowded space. Businesses are increasingly
focusing on B2B relationships as an alternative method of extending their
online reach and developing new product offerings. Several new approaches
to Internet distribution channels have emerged that go beyond the traditional
models of targeted advertising on specific sites via banner advertisements
or portal links.
Through collaborative commerce, businesses can capitalize on the unique
aspects of the Internet to offer solutions that transcend traditional business
models. The Internet makes possible a radical paradigm shift with the potential
to transform insular supply chains and B2B exchanges and sub-optimal approaches
to online consumer distribution into open and dynamic marketplaces or trading
communities. Companies can publish information online so that it is instantly
available to all business partners and potentially to the end-consumer. Ideally,
online marketplaces should be open and able to operate with similar systems,
so that buyers and suppliers can reach the largest number of business partners,
irrespective of the procurement or trading applications they may be using
or the trading communities to which they belong. In addition, the Internet
can enable the interlinking of these marketplaces to allow the end-consumer
to access wholesale exchanges directly, disintermediating traditional distribution
channels and creating new opportunities to dynamically cross-sell or upsell.
Through the relationships created and maintained by business partners
participating in an online network brought together by common or complementary
business and market demands, partners can combine financial and enterprise
resources to create new value and reach new markets. This allows large companies
to bring online traditional business partners, such as suppliers and distributors,
and help each network participant broaden its market reach and create new
markets. In addition, this collaborative commerce model goes beyond affiliated
networks by replacing [vertical/linear] and closed selling chains with a web
of collaborating partners working together to present jointly created offerings.
This allows a business to leverage the power of the Internet rapidly to create
a worldwide distribution system and customer reach irrespective of its established
physical distribution capabilities. In essence, the Internet permits businesses
to go beyond traditional distribution chains to create a matrix of online
business partners.
Previous
Table of Contents
The collaborative commerce requirements
A software platform for building collaborative commerce must help companies
dynamically manage and more profitably reconfigure their business partnerships
to increase revenue and reduce costs. For example, manufacturers can choose
the distributors and suppliers that will optimize the market presence of their
products and merchants and portals can jointly develop combined offers targeting
specific audiences.
The collaborative commerce platform must allow the creation of dynamic
networks of business partners. The networks are dynamic in that businesses
can use them for all types of online commerce, including B2B and B2C, can
include any number of partners on their network and can focus their marketing
efforts in any direction.
The functional requirements for a software to build online partnerships
can be in separated two folds:
- 1. Management of the business relationship: contract, payment,..etc, including the definition of collaborative web site as an aggregation of the partners' web sites built dynamically.
- 2. The effectiveness of this partnership must be measurable. This is obtained by tracking all the activities on the resulting web site.
There is a requirement for a very open and flexible software to allow
different levels of customization:
- Each company wants to manage its partners in a different way both in terms of user interface but also in term of the definition of the actors and objects managed by the platform.
- Access from different kind of users: the information to be displayed to different actors must be different. For example the merchant can see information about all the activities on its web site while his partners will have access only to the part that concerns the traffic he brought to the web site.
- Reporting: the information on the web site activities must be easily accessible and in a customizable way.
- The platform must be able to use and to connect to the existing environment such as ERPs or profiling tools
iChannel : a collaborative commerce platform based on XML
Entirely based on Java, XML and XSL, iChannel is a software platform
to help connected business to build their partner network for collaborative
commerce.
The business rules and workflow as well as the technical product implementation
are based on abstract business object modeling, executed in XML (Extensible
Mark-up Language) and Java. The user interface is defined by XSL style sheets
which allows easy customization. The overall architecture is based on an application
server, providing scalability, performance and easy integration with third
party tools.
XML is used to abstract access to and from iChannel and increase implementation
flexibility.
- An external XML layer at the Application Programmatic Interface is used to isolate iChannel and enables direct B2B communication across a Java API. This B2B communication as well as the integration with other modules or software can also be done using an XML bus based on the JMS standard. This enables communication and data processing between iChannel and any other business applications.
- XML is also used to communicate across the Storage Manager when storing and retrieving objects. This added abstraction layer has the business benefit of enabling database storage independence and eventually seamless access to fragmented data storage across multiple systems. Moreover, new business objects or extension of the business objects can be done in Java or XML and the persistence is obtained automatically by defining the new XML mapping in an XML file.
A DTD defines all the business objects managed by the platform. All
interactions with the platform and between the different modules of the platform
are done using XML (either using a XML compliant document or a DOM tree).
If the access to the platform is done by an end user through a browser then
the XML answer document is sent to a presentation manager that uses an XSL
style sheet to generates the HTML page to be sent to the user. In the case
of a B2B access, then the XML document is sent directly to the calling client
(a Java program).
IChannel’s architecture is based on an application server architecture.
This means that it can be deployed with a commercial application server to
ensure load balancing, security, database transaction management etc. An XML/JMS
bus is used to exchange data from the different modules that use the platform
allowing an easy connection to third party tools, legacy data etc.
In order to preserve integrity and isolation, the databases are accessed
only via an XML protocol. This has the advantage that iChannel is impervious
to how and where the information is stored, leading to distributed data sources
and database independence.
The customizability of the user interface is easily obtained by the
combined use of XML and XSL, allowing the complete separation of content and
presentation. It enables modification of the look and feel and of the workflow,
without changing anything inside the software. By changing XSL files, the
user of the system can easily adapt the product to his own needs and corporate
image specifications.
Construction of a virtual site as an intelligent and dynamic aggregation
of data coming from several web sites, requires the following:
- a tool to describe the components that will be used to build the virtual site
- a tool to describe how to aggregate the components
- the possibility of displaying the virtual site on various client interfaces such as a browser, or a mobile phone.
XML is the appropriate technology to describe the components that are
part of the virtual site, while XSL is used to defined how the components
must be aggregated to build the virtual pages. XSL is also the tool to build
customizable presentations of a web site (virtual or not) that will be displayed
differently depending on the browser used.
IChannel allows a set of merchants or digital market places to exchange
product offering and information on their respective partners. The exchange
of offers can lead to combinations such as bundles. For example, a market
place devoted to computers, can exchange an offer with a peripheral provider
to build a new bundle combining a computer with a printer. The exchange is
done through XML files with the descriptions on which combination is acceptable
by each party. These XML files are then merged into a DTD representing combined
offers. The tpaXML proposed standard is currently studied as a candidate to
represent this collaboration over connected businesses.
Having developed software application to manage business partnership
between commerce sites on the web, we think that the choice of XML and XSL
as the basis of our architecture was the right choice.
Conclusion
We have developed a software platform using industry standards such
as application server architecture, XML, XSL and Java. We are convinced that
it was the right choice to obtain an open and flexible software that can be
extended and customized easily while easy to integrate in existing environment
and connectable to other software. Nevertheless, developing a product using
XML and XSL extensively, has given rise to several issues that we would like
to share with the XML community:
- The performance of XSL is of big concern. The tools that are currently available are not scalable enough. Compilation seems to be the right solution.
- Is the use of DOM as the internal representation of the business objects the best approach? DOM gives extensibility, genericity but it makes the code a lot more complex than an approach where specific object classes are used.
We expect improvement on the standards to leverage the capability of
our software. Xschema and XQL are the two important directions for us. XSchema
because it is important to be able to check the data type of the exchanged
information and to define constraints. A standard XML interface to relational
databases that takes into account the rich model of XML will give us database
independence and an automatic coherence between the XML schema and the database
schema.