Object-Oriented Architectures for Electronic Commerce

The Web is exciting because of its potential to be ubiquitous soon. So electronic commerce will be tightly coupled to this medium and people will buy goods over the Internet instead of going to stores. The precondition for electronic commerce is that existing information systems are enhanced to support the Web. Another exciting opportunity will be the distribution of software components over the Internet. Tough software components comprise just one specific product, this will habe a profound impact on how software systems will be built in the future. The paper sketches the key roleof semifinished oo architectures for both, the enhancement of existing informationsystems and plug-and-play componentware. It includes a discussion of the concepts underlying framework technology andof some design heuristics known so far.