Abstract
The Internet is an extremely rich source of online information and services. However, complex client requests, involving and combining several types of services, are difficult to handle without some form of support. This is particularly true in the case of electronic commerce, where complex transactions may involve several independent good providers, bankers, delivery services, etc. Hence the need for “brokering” services, whose offers combine in the best possible way offers coming from existing, specialized services publicly available on the Net, in order to match customers' constraints. The Xpect framework for electronic commerce has been developed for that purpose. In this paper, we illustrate it through a case study in the context of distributed print-on-demand. We propose an architecture and implementation of the case study based on CLF, a distributed application development tool relying on a rich object model and its corresponding coordination scripting facility.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
J.-M. Andreoli, J.-L. Meunier, and D. Pagani, “Process enactment and coordination,” in Proc. of EWSPT'96, Nancy, France, 1996, pp. 195-216.
J.-M. Andreoli, F. Pacull, D. Pagani, and R. Pareschi, “Multiparty negotiation for dynamic distributed object services,” Journal of Science of Computer Programming, vol. 31, pp. 179-203, 1998.
J.-M. Andreoli, F. Pacull, and R. Pareschi, “Xpect: A framework for electronic commerce,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 1,No. 4, pp. 40-48, 1997.
N. Carriero and D. Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1990.
S. Caughey, D. Ingham, and P. Watson, “Metabroker: A generic broker for electronic commerce,” Technical Report, Newcastle University, UK, 1998.
A. Chavez and P. Maes, “Kasbah: An agent marketplace for buying and selling goods,” in Proc. of 1st Int'l Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, 1996, pp. 75-90.
Steve B. Cousins, Steven P. Ketchpel, Andreas Paepcke, Héctor García-Molina, Scott W. Hassan, and Martin Roescheisen, “Interpay: Managing multiple payment mechanisms in digital libraries,” in Second Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, 1995.
T. Finin, Y. Labrou, and J. Mayfield, “KQML as an agent communication language,” in Software Agents, J. Bradshaw (Ed.), MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1997.
A. Grasso, J.-L. Meunier, D. Pagani, and R. Pareschi, “Distributed coordination and workflow on the world wide web,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 6,No. 2, pp. 1-26, 1997.
S. Jajodia and L. Kerschberg (Eds.), Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures, Kluwer Academics Publishers, 1997.
Object Management Group and X/Open. OMG, CORBA, the common object request broker: Architecture and specification, 1991. OMG Document Number 91.12.1, Rev. 1.1.
P. Panurach, “Money in electronic commerce: Digital cash, electronic fund transfer, and ecash,” Communication of the ACM, vol. 39,no. 6, pp. 45-50, 1996.
R.G. Smith, “The contract net protocol: High level communication and control in a distributed problem solver,” IEEE Transactions on Computing, vol. 29,no. 12, pp. 1104-1113, 1980.
J. Tenenbaum, T. Chowdry, and K. Hughes, “The Eco system: Comercenet's architectural framework for internet commerce,” Technical Report, CommerceNet Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA, 1997.
H. Wächter and A. Reuter, “The Contracts model,” in Database Transaction Models for Advanced Applications, A. Elmagarmid (Ed.), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: San Mateo, CA, USA, 1993.
D. Worah and A. Sheth, “Transactions in transactional workflows,” in Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures, S. Jajodia and L. Kerschberg (Eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Andreoli, JM., Pacull, F. Distributed Print on Demand Systems in the Xpect Framework. Distributed and Parallel Databases 7, 179–198 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008706628221
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008706628221