Exerscise 10: Application Server Platforms in E-Commerce

1. Go to the website of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase. Is there any mention of e-commerce associated with their database products? What suite or partnership do they list with related e-commerce offerings? How do they compare with open source products like MySQL?


The following is my observation after browsing the related sites of IBM


IBM’s main offerings relating to e-commerce revolve around the Websphere suite of products. However its most famous DB2 database products are focused more on data management.(this supports database driven e-commerce applications.)
Link :-
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS200-415

Oracle refers to iStore and Siebel Commerce suites as their E-commerce platform that supports database driven applications.

http://www.oracle.com/applications/crm/siebel/self-service-ebilling/siebel-e-commerce-8-1-1.html. They detail that this can be integrated with their own ERP applications.

Microsoft’s SQL server have SQL Server Database Engine and SQL Server Management Studio components. Using these, the database can be built, and then published using .NET Framework SDK 2.0 or Microsoft Visual Studio (Readme_reviewWatcher, 2009).
Their e-commerce efforts has been with MSDN for small business although they also have relevant articles dated for 2005 MS SQL for e-commerce.
Their latest releases are here (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx)

Sybase does not focus on e-commerce however Sybase database products are often used as a backend to widely used ERP systems. These systems will only integrate with specified products seamlessly. To integrate them with other database systems, customisation and intermediate layers will be required.

MySQL data can be published interactively to the web using PHP. Although this is not an out-of-the-box solution, it provides greater flexibility, and reduces the overall cost of ownership. They have released their own version of GUI tools to help ease with the Database Administration

MySQL is a open source GPL license (acquired by Sun OS), but IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase are all related to paid/license software. In terms of functionality, there isn't much difference other than scalability and performance.



2. Why is the perception getting stronger that integration will become a critical factor in coming days? What is the role of AJAX within the enterprise software architecture?


Integration is gradually becoming more vital and critical to businesses as there is an increasing demand to access information across their systems and to integrate with other organizations as well. Large businesses expect their suppliers and customers to send or make data available and others focus on new technologies which allow integration and to push the demands forward. The most efficient way to do this is to automate the flow of data throughout the supply chain.

AJAX(Asynchronous Javascript and XML) refers to a wide range of web technologies that allow a web application to communicate with a background server (AJAX – Wikipedia, n.d.). Web applications that use AJAX can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages. This additional functionality allows various sources to be integrated together seamlessly for the end user.



3. What are the similarities between the object-oriented development using model-view-controller (MVC) in Ruby on Rails 2.0 and Action Script 2.0 (Flash animations)?


1. Both Actionscript 2.0 and Ruby on Rails 2.0 have syntax for creating classes and objects. (They are Object Oriented Programming tools)
2. Used in some applications – Actionscript 2.0 in Alpha Five, and Ruby on Rails mostly with MySQL.
3. They have development tools which have built-in functionality for prototyping, and use freeform languages.