Effective strategies for integrating businesses on the Net using XML   Table of contents   Indexes   Business process integration through XML
 B2B, business-to-business 
 e-commerce  
 

XML and XSL for managing ecommerce partnership

Gamerman, Sophie
 
 Sophie  Gamerman
 Product Manager
  France 
 Paris La Défense 
 iMediation 
iMediation,  Tour Pascal A
22 route de la demi-lune
Paris La Défense   92045 France
Phone: (33) 1 71 00 68 43 Fax: (33) 1 71 00 68 01 email: sgamerman@Imediation.com web site: www.imediation.com
 Biography
 Sophie Gamerman - Sophie Gamerman is the Product Manager for iChannel, the flagship product of iMediation. She was the technical representative for Ardent Software at the Object Database Management Group where she was the editor of the OQL chapter. She made several presentations at Object conferences on XML and Databases, query languages and XML. Sophie holds a Ph. D in computer science.
Baudu, Regis
 
 Regis  Baudu
 Director Research and Development
  France 
 Paris La Défense 
 iMediation 
iMediation,  Tour Pascal A
22 route de la demi-lune
Paris La Défense   92045 France
Phone: (33) 1 71 00 68 00 Fax: (33) 1 71 00 68 01 email: rbaudu@Imediation.com web site: www.imediation.com
 Biography
 Regis Baudu - Regis Baudu is the director of Research and Developpement for iMediation, a company member of Oasis, GCA,and W3C. He was previously at Netaway in charge of the development of an XML application server. He did several presentations and training on XML and XML application servers at various Workshops and Conferences including Comdex and Internet World.
 Abstract
 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
e-commerce B2B
 

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.
 

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.
    Effective strategies for integrating businesses on the Net using XML   Table of contents   Indexes   Business process integration through XML