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Overview of WebLogic Commerce Server Components

 

This section contains the following topics:

What are Commerce Server components?

A Quick Look at a Few Key Components

Customer and Session

ShoppingAdvisor and Items

Order Fulfillment

Features at a Glance

Specifications

eCommerce brings tremendous opportunity and new challenges.

Build versus Buy: WLCS components offer the best of both solutions.

How do WLCS components work?

Applications built with WLCS components leverage a scaleable, high-performance Architecture.

Components are easy to use and customize.

Base your eCommerce applications on our smart models and generated EJBs.

Components use industry-standard Design and Analysis Patterns.

Components are neatly organized in Component Packages.

MyBuyBeans.com Example

 


What are Commerce Server components?

At the heart of the BEA WebLogic Commerce Server (WLCS) are the Commerce Server components. Commerce Server components are software building blocks for eBusiness that can be selected and snapped together to create a robust eCommerce Web presence. You can use any component as is, or customize or extend it to fit particularly unique aspects of your business scenario. This family of Enterprise Java Beans helps you bring new e-business services to your customers quickly and easily, while allowing you to focus precious resources on your unique competitive requirements.

The WLCS components family is structured as packages. Each package contains a set of components that plays a specific role in assembling an enterprise application. WLCS provides industry specific component packages for financial services, telecommunications, and Internet retail. Today WLCS includes component packages required to build e-business applications, with an emphasis on Internet e-commerce and customer self-service.

Using novel design patterns, we have modeled, designed, built, and tested our reusable server-side components to work seamlessly in conjunction with your commercial EJB application server.

 


A Quick Look at a Few Key Components

Following are descriptions of only a few of the key eBusiness components (order, invoice, customer, session, and shoppingAdvisor). WLCS includes more than 80 out-of-the-box, pluggable Java components designed to provide most of the functionality of essential e-business. For a more comprehensive and detailed look at the components, you can refer to Components Catalog, or the complete API in Javadoc.

Customer and Session

The fundamental entities for any business are customers and the products sold to them. The Customer is an extension of the Axiom.Person. It provides the ability to store contact, profile, and billing information for your customers. The Session components are used to manage the process of allowing customers to access the system as guests and then to register when they are ready to make a purchase. They also bind customers to the orders that they build.

ShoppingAdvisor and Items

The Item is the interface to the products that you are selling. It stores basic product identification and description, and provides a mechanism for pricing, including runtime pluggable pricing policies. The pricing mechanism is designed to allow you to take into account a specific customer's profile. This allows the application of special merchandising discounts and incentives. The ShoppingAdvisor is the means by which you organize your products and make them searchable. Its additional features include learning about customer preferences over time and recommending products based on the resulting profile.

Order Fulfillment

The Order acts both as a shopping cart and the basis for order fulfillment. It is the mechanism by which a customer keeps track of items that they want to purchase. The list is manipulated through business methods so that overloading can enforce the business rules associated with building an order. There is also an order cost calculation method that can be used to take into account discounts across multiple individual orders.

When an order is completed it is bound to a PackingList so that shipping cost can be calculated. The next step is the creation of an Invoice, so that the order can be billed. Finally, the Inventory is updated.

The TroubleTicket components provide customer service issue tracking. These components provide you the ability to accept and track issues submitted by your customers.

 


Features at a Glance

 


Specifications

 


eCommerce brings tremendous opportunity and new challenges.

Application server and EJB technologies present a tremendous opportunity for enterprise information systems. Businesses can gain competitive advantages by rapidly deploying applications that address today's sophisticated requirements of integration, networking and scalability. However, building these systems from the ground up, without using specialized tools and prebuilt components, demands a great effort and expense.

A software development team building an eBusiness application using EJBs faces challenges that are compound by the increasingly short delivery times. To be successful a development team must be able to perform the following tasks seamlessly in record time frames:

Developers can take advantage of application server features and advanced tools to accelerate development but regardless of infrastructure and tools, they still must build all the business objects that make up their application. This task involves a tremendous amount of risk and effort.

 


Build versus Buy: WLCS components offer the best of both solutions.

In the process of planning eBusiness applications, corporations are faced with a build or buy decision. Building an application of this kind from the ground up would consume considerable time and resources. On the other hand, an off-the-shelf application does not meet the company's unique needs. The best solution is to use components. Components are packages of pre-built business functions that jump-start the development of an eBusiness application. Components allow developers to customize and snap together enterprise applications quickly, while tailoring them to specific business needs. The result is a complete solution that takes advantage of EJB technology without its time-consuming complexities.

The BEA WebLogic Commerce Server provides a complete family of EJB components for eBusiness. Developers using WebLogic Commerce Server components do not need to start from scratch or master EJB complexities. By using WLCS components, developers can build eBusiness applications customized for their company's unique business needs in record time frames.

 


How do WLCS components work?

WebLogic Commerce Server components can interact with each other as well as interact with other EJBs outside the component family. They have been modeled, designed, built, and tested to work together as a family and in combination with third party and customer-built EJBs. Applications built using WLCS components take the maximum advantage of EJB and application server technology.

Applications built with WLCS components leverage a scaleable, high-performance Architecture.

WLCS components are designed to work together at run-time in a distributed, highly interactive environment. Once snapped together and deployed, these components can form an efficient, robust eCommerce application or engine, automatically leveraging powerful object oriented design patterns and taking full advantage of EJB 1.1 features. The WLCS component architecture provides the framework for scaleable, high-performance, enterprise-class eCommerce applications.

BEA also provides the complete WLCS component object model in Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. Developers can either select existing pluggable components from the model or extend and customize components, using a WLCS tool to generate EJB source code based on the model. Either way, the integrity of the object model and its design advantages are ensured in the application development process. Developers can focus on writing the business logic in their applications, and rely on the WLCS architecture to supply all the details of a well-designed EJB application, including transaction processing, messaging, proven design patterns and business policies, efficient database access across the network, and so on. All the good stuff you get by using an object oriented development methodology is built in to the components.

For a live example of this powerful EJB component architecture put to work as a Web presence, see the "Getting Started" topic in the WebLogic Commerce Server Components MyBuyBeans Tour..

Components are easy to use and customize.

WLCS components are designed with usability in mind. Their ease of use allows developers to rapidly customize components and snap together applications with minimal training. Components are easily customizable and can be extended to make new components specific to a particular business. WLCS components include customization tools that integrate with leading modeling tools and Java IDEs. To customize or extend a component, developers simply customize its associated object model, and WLCS automated tools generate the customized code.

Base your eCommerce applications on our smart models and generated EJBs.

WebLogic Commerce Server components make it easy to model an application. Using industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML), analysts can graphically model your company's business process, selecting WLCS components from a repository.

WLCS provides you with a basic, EJB 1.1 compliant, eBusiness UML model. Analysts and developers simply extend and modify the base eBusiness model, using the WLCS components as needed.

Once the UML class diagram is completed, all components and all object relationships are automatically generated using the WLCS Smart Generator. The Smart Generator is a tool that transforms a UML representation of your business process into EJB components. All the source code, object definitions, object relationships, documentation, and EJB-required files are automatically created by the Smart Generator. Adding a relationship between two objects is as easy as drawing a line between them. Using visual modeling and roundtrip engineering, changes to the business model can be rapidly translated into changes in the application, greatly reducing maintenance cost and boosting application reliability.

For more information about the development process, see Development Process.

Components use industry-standard Design and Analysis Patterns.

WebLogic Commerce Server components interact with each other using industry standard Design Patterns to solve a wide range of business problems. The use of proven design patterns results in a better business model, lowered cost of development and maintenance, and faster time-to-market.

Industry Standard Design Patterns

WLCS Component Examples

Description

Benefits

Strategy, Policy, and Chain of Responsibility Patterns

Individual Instance Method analysis pattern

BusinessPolicy

BusinessPolicy is a set of Behavioral patterns. It lets you interchange business policies.

BusinessPolicy pattern works with organizational business hierarchies to manage the company's business policies.

Provides pluggable methods that can be changed at developent time or at runtime.

Allows for fast adaptation of new/customized business policies with minimum cost.

These new business policies can be tailored for specific clients or organizations.

Command and Action Patterns

Task

A Behavioral pattern that encapsulates a business process that provides isolation between business logic and business objects.

Allows the separation of business logic from business objects. Results in lower maintenance costs.

Abstract Factory Pattern

SmartHome, BelongingHome

A Creational pattern that provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.

Provides a consistent programming model for creation of objects. Results in lower maintenance costs.

Aggregation with Life Cycle Pattern

Singleton and collection aggregation of business objects by value, and by reference.

A combination of Creational and Behavioral patterns that provide flexible ways to control the life cycle of aggregate objects directly from its owner.

Provides a complete set of powerful and flexible APIs to maximize programming efficiency. Results in a better business model design and lower application development costs

Proxy Pattern

SmartHandle, Collection of remote objects.

A Structural pattern that provides a surrogate or placeholder for another object to control access to it. Allows for lazy evaluation of large collections of remote objects.

Allows for a natural modeling of business relationships without compromising performance

Components are neatly organized in Component Packages.

The WebLogic Commerce Server components family is structured as packages. Each package contains a set of components that plays a specific role in assembling an enterprise application.

WLCS includes more than 80 out-of-the-box, pluggable Java components designed to provide most of the functionality of essential e-business. For a comprehensive and detailed look at the components, see Components Catalog, or the complete API in Javadoc.

 


MyBuyBeans.com Example

If you would like to see a working example of how to snap together the WebLogic Commerce Server components to form a robust, high-performance, retail Web site, see the WebLogic Commerce Server Components MyBuyBeans Tour.. The tour steps you through the development and deployment process using the imaginary MyBuyBeans.com retailer as a focus.