Corporate Info | News | Solutions | Products | Partners | Services | Events | Download | How To Buy
Commerce Servers Doc Home | WebLogic Components Doc Home | Using WebLogic Components | Previous Topic | Next Topic | Contents

Overview of WebLogic Components

This topic includes the following sections:

- eCommerce Component Packages

- Features of eCommerce Components

- Specifications for eCommerce Components

eCommerce Component Packages

BEA's WebLogic Components are software building blocks for eBusiness. This family of Enterprise Java Beans helps you bring new business services to your customers quickly and easily, while allowing you to focus precious resources on your unique competitive requirements.

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.This overview describes these components and how they interact to create a Web presence. You can also refer to the complete component catalog (list only) or the complete API.

Customer and Session

The most basic 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 of eCommerce Components

- Enterprise JavaBeans built from the ground up

- Plug-and-play components that allow you either to use our out-of-the-box solution, or to integrate with your legacy applications

- Easy-to-use component APIs Fully customizable and extensible using technologies like pluggable methods and dynamic runtime configuration

- Implemented using established design and analysis patterns for ease of use and re-use

- Components work with other EJBs, including third-party and custom-built components

- High-performance features such as pass-by-value (PBV)

- Works with leading EJB Application Servers

- Works with leading databases (Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Cloudscape, etc.)

- Integrate with legacy systems (CICS, IMS, legacy databases)

- You don't need to be an EJB expert to use them!

Specifications for eCommerce Components

- 100% Pure Java

- BSCs are Enterprise JavaBeans 1.0

- Support for Java 1.1 (Java 2 forthcoming)

- Support for the advanced Java 2 Collections API

- Support for Enterprise Java APIs including EJB, RMI, JNDI, JTS, and JDBC

- Support for modeling using UML, with roundtrip engineering from Rational Rose

- Component can be invoked from Java Clients, Java Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP/JHTML), CORBA Clients and Servers, ActiveX/COM, and other clients (Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, etc.)

- Full support for BEA's WebLogic. Support for other leading application servers coming soon.

Copyright © 2000 BEA Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Required browser: Netscape 4.0 or higher, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher.