Scenario: Beans & Co., The Online Beans Distributor

 

It's Monday morning. You are called into a meeting and told that Beans & Co. is adding a new line to its many products: beanie hats! Since the beanie hat market is expected to be very profitable and Marketing plans to start running beanie hat advertisements next week, this new product line needs to be available on-line at the MyBuyBeans.com site "yesterday". Furthermore, Management has come up with a unique pricing policy for beanie hats: propellers increase the base price of a beanie hat by two dollars each. As the lead architect of the MyBuyBeans.com site, you have been chosen to come up with a solution.

After convincing Marketing and Management that "yesterday" is not a feasible due date, you agree to finish the development and testing by the end of the week. As you are leaving the meeting, one of the VPs mentions that this is crucial to the success of the company:

We know you can even do it in less than a week. No one here has forgotten what your team accomplished in the original launch of our MyBuyBeans site!

You leave the room thinking, "No problem. I'll just run into a telephone booth, and transform into a super-human being! Everything will be done on time!" At the same time, you feel proud of your team's accomplishments in developing the MyBuyBeans.com site. As you walk back to your desk, you start thinking about the effort involved in creating the site.

You recall that you implemented the site using BEA WebLogic Commerce Server. This product provides a significant portion of the business functionality and they were easy-to-use, reusable, customizable, standard-based, and extensible. As a result, you and your team finished the site in 1/3 the expected time. Aaahyes! Maybe you can extend the basic WebLogic Commerce Server Item to add unique properties for beanie hats. You could also leverage the pluggable WebLogic Commerce Server methods for pricing flexibility. You slowly being to realize that your assignment is actually quite possible!