Integrating Web-based e-commerce applications with business application systems

The World Wide Web has become an environment for distributed applications of all kinds. The originally intended use of the Web as distributed system for knowledge-interchange seems to disappear, compared to the increasing number of electronic commerce Web applications. Organizations offer products and services in the Web, and use the Web as a means to integrate their (heterogeneous) business application systems. Offering Web-based products requires combining services of different application systems, which were built on the coarse-grained Web implementation model. Reusing the respective fine-grained services and application systems respectively integrating these cross-platform application systems increases quality and reduces costs of the new product. However, communication between (legacy) business application systems has to be ensured on an abstract level to realize this scenario. The Web as a global point of sale seems to be very promising but obviously suffers from its heritage – the coarse-grained implementation model. We introduce a generic integration layer that uses an object-oriented approach as well as the WebComposition Markup Language to facilitate the reuse of code and design, and show how inter-application communication can be provided by means of an additional basic integration layer. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.