Exercise 10. Application Server platforms in e-commerce

1. In the IBM website, it refers its e-commerce suites to Websphere whereas its most famous DB2 database products are more focused on to data management - although this intrinsicly also supports database driven e-commerce applications. Link is here
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS200-415

In the ORACLE website, it largely refers their Siebel Commerce suites as their E-commerce platform that supports database driven applications. Link is here
http://www.oracle.com/applications/crm/siebel/self-service-ebilling/siebel-e-commerce-8-1-1.html

Sybase website also mentions its GDI . Link is here http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1008953

For Microsoft, 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.

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. AJAX stands for (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. (Wikipedia, 2009)

Garrett (2005) suggested that "An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary —an Ajax engine —between the user and the server" And because of this efficiency, many organisation in the connected economy can employed this development framework as the software architecture of choice. The use of Ajax can reduce connections to the server, reducing IPC calls and users experience faster or more responsive applications. These important attributes will be significant in the enterprise software development level.

3. Ruby on rails's MVC and Flash's Action Script 2.0 are both object oriented programming language which allows both to create classes, definte sub-classes and its relationships.




Reference:

Garrett, J (2005) Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. Adaptive Path. Retrieved on Apr 12 at http://www.robertspahr.com/courses/cwd/ajax_web_applications.pdf


Wikipedia (2009) Definition of AJAX. retreieved on Apr 12, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX