e-Commerce Framework Architecture for Legacy Applications

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In today's Internet economy, more and more medium sized companies are taking their sales and marketing functions to the internet. To do so, companies find that they need e-commerce sites that are flexible, highly available, scalable, and secure. The problem is that their backend systems are not web enabled and they need an e-Commerce Architecture that integrates with the legacy applications.

The NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework Architecture provides this end-to-end solution for development and deployment of their e-commerce site. The architecture is a scalable business-to-consumer (B2C) application that  helps your global business to sell online. It has an advanced administration backoffice suite that allow you to easily manage your product catalogs remotely, dynamically change prices based on dates or promotions and ensure on-time delivery of products. Because this can be done at the database level, new values are propagated to the web page automatically, not requiring a WebMaster to change pages. The major features are:

• Dynamic Mutli-Language support
• Database driven Customizable Product Pages
• Dynamic Shopping Cart
• Unlimited scalability with Workflow Engine
• Unlimited Product Catalog
• User and Roles
• Credit Card Processing
• Multiple Company Website Partitions
• Order Processing Fulfillment
• Secure Remote Web Interface Administration
• Email blaster service for promotions

The NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework enables your company to bridge your legacy applications to support eCommerce Frameworks.  NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework enables an adaptable, highly scalable and flexible website built on the NXTware Evolution Server, which can run on multiple platforms.  It is perfect for companies who need a web presence to sell their products, but the internet COTS website packages are too rigid or elementary for their needs.

Background of eCube Chief Product Architect

e-Commerce Framework Architecture

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The NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework architecture is currently used by medium to large companies who want to inegrate their existing legacy systems seamlessly with their e-commerce solution. The framework has been fully tested not only with some of our former Borland customers, but is the architecture currently used here at eCube Systems' e-Commerce web-site. The goal of this document is to communicate the underlying architecture and performance results achieved by eCube engineers with this e-commerce framework. The document describes a flexible e-commerce multi-platform deployment capabilities and test results from using this framework in a production environment. This intent of this document is to provides clients with enough information to select NXTeSolution to integrate and transform their legacy applications with their own e-commerce deployment efforts.

A successful legacy e-commerce architecture deployment requires expertise from both the legacy and new technology application development camps. Experience has proven that leveraging legacy applications and modernizing architecture dependent modules speeds up the integration process since few customers understand them enough to re-write or significantly modify them. Too often, the legacy application deployment has not been designed to integrate with the internet. Just wrappering the applications or putting "web-facing" creates too much additional code, slowing down the application, resulting in in lost sales, lost profits, and lost customers.

Unlike other eCommerce Solutions that restrict you to Microsoft software, the NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework Architecture leverages middleware that supports a wide variety of databases (Oracle, DB2, SQLServer, MYSQL, Sybase, Informix), web servers (IIS, Apache) and allows servers to run on multiple platforms including legacy systems such as:

• AIX 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
• HP-UX 9,10,11
• Linux Suse
• Linux Redhat 4,5,6,7
• Linux Ubuntu
• Solaris, 2.5, 2.6, 8, 9, 10
• Windows NT, 98, 2000, 2003
• OpenVMS 8.3

NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework is entirely written in the highly portable languages Java and delivered with source, but the heart of the NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework is the ultra-fast NXTera and the XML/ESB enabled NXTware middleware components that facilitate the data exchange between legacy systems and newer technologies. NXTware also provides an Eclipse-based maintenance and development framework not only for Java, but C and C++ servers so developers can share the same environment. NXTeSolution ecommerce Framework has a Java architecture because it is based on open standards and does not restrict you to any specific platform unlike Microsoft's C# language. To make the content more dynamic, the website content is almost 100% database driven. Since NXTeSolution leverages a Work Flow Engine in conjuntion with its partitioned designed Java servers, it has the ability to start multiple servers and scale based on demand. This e-Commerce Framework provides a host of attractive features like: multi-language support, email blaster, a cart service, session service, legacy computer language support, order entry system, credit card service, log file server for tracking and administrative interface for ease of development and administration.  Support for legacy languages with its built in NXTware middleware allows you a highly flexible environment and augments the capability of your eCommerce Framework - it can now provide compatibility and scalability that will enhance application performance, security, reliability and deployment.

eCommerce Framework Software Source

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The NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework is delivered with source, so you don't have to worry about losing your equity in this solution. The eCommerce Framework comes with customizable language templates, a partitioning service for multiple websites, a catalog service, XML profiles for administrators, operators, customers and clients, reusable sets of class libraries and an XML based presentation layer that brings your eCommerce Solution into SOA. NXTeSolution eCommerce framework internal design is described in the following schematic.

 

 

Multiple Language support

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The NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework incorporates support for multi-languages with a language service and a database driven content manager that allows you to incorporate multiple language support for your website. In conjunction with the web-based administrator tool, it also allows the user to create multiple versions of the text on the website, register each version with the language service and add those entries to the supported languages list box on the fly. You can even modify the administrator interface with their native language.

eCommerce Framework Benefits

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In addition to a dynamic language service and all of the standard features of an e-Commerce Framework, NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework provides these additional benefits:

• Platform independence
• Highly scalable, high performance eCommerce frameworks
• Rapid time to market
• Database driven content manager
• Partitioning Server to allow multiple website support
• Secure Credit card interface support
• Multi-platform and legacy support of: Java, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran
• Total integration with backend legacy systems
• Supports XML to communicate with Partners and Vendors
• Enables multi-language support

 For more references on the NXTeSolution eCommerce Framework, see our reference section.