E-commerce, distributed processing and the Internet

E-commerce
E-business guide (2004, Building - E-commerce - selling on your website, para.1) describes that e-commerce is a buying, selling and ordering services and goods activities on the Internet. The web and e-mail are the facilitation to make any electronic transactions happen. The simple transaction is a customer ordering goods on the online store and paying it by credit card.

The most common types of e-commerce are:

1. B2B – Business to Business
   This kind of e-commerce is a transaction among a company with another company. They pass the information to each other by the Internet.
2. B2C – Business to Consumer
   A company sells their products or services directly to the consumers through the Internet. For example, a buyer ordering a product to the computer store and the buyer pay the bills in electronic way as well.
3. B2E – Business to Employee
   This kind of e-commerce is known as intranet where an employee can access to organization website to get information through organization network.
4. C2C
   A seller personally sells his or her goods or services to a buyer. The simple example is ebay. This is an auction site where many buyers bid a product from the seller and the higher bidder deserve to get the product.

Distributed applications
If a program runs on more than one computer and connects through a network is called a distributed application (Indiana University 2006, p.1). The common distributed applications consist of two different software programs: the front-end software (client) and the back-end software (server). The workstations run front-end software (client). The application is software to handle user interface and processing functions, such as Microsoft Word is a program that receiving input from a keyboard, manipulating or editing word document and displaying output on a screen. Back-end software manages shared resources, such as printers, modems and disks and running on a shared system, such as a shared VMS or UNIX system. The back-end software has a capability as the main processing for the application.

The distributed application concept is simple, a computer can be a client and another computer can be a server or more widely, several servers connecting many clients. The example is a web browser which a browser need servers on the World Wide Web and front-end software such as Internet Explorer requests the web page to the servers.

The Internet
The Internet is the biggest network that connects million of computers all around the world and the information can be sent from any computer to the other computers in 24 hours a day. These computers can be in government departments, schools, small and large businesses, universities or homes. It can be single personal computers or any type of computer or even workstations on a company or school network. The term internet usually defines as a network of networks because the smaller networks of each organization connected into on huge network named the Internet. All computers have the same connection to the Internet and the only different is the speed of the connection which depends on Internet Service Provider (ISP) and modem (Sofweb 2006, p.1).

Generally, the Internet has a protocol called TCP/IP. IP has a task to move packet of data from one node to another node. IP will forward every packet to the destination address (a four byte IP number). The Internet authorities define the range of numbers to other organizations. The organizations define parts of their numbers to departments. IP works on gateway machine which send data form department to organization to region and then all around the world. TCP is responsible to verify the appropriate delivery of data from client to server. Data may be lost in the middle of the network. TCP supports to detect any errors or lost of data and as a trigger to retransmit until the data is fully received (Wikipedia 2006, p.1).

References

Building – E-commerce – Selling on your website 2004, last edited 5 November 2004, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, ACT, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://www.e-businessguide.gov.au/building/e-commerce>

Distributed application 2006, last edited 12 June 2006, Wikipedia Foundation, Inc., n.a., viewed 4 March 2007, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_application>

E-commerce 2007, last edited 16 February 2007, Wikipedia Foundation, Inc., n.a., viewed 4 March 2007, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce>

E-commerce benefits 2006, last edited 22 September 2006, The State of Queensland (Department of State Development), Queensland, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://www.sd.qld.gov.au/dsdweb/v3/guis/templates/content/gui_cue_cntnhtml.cfm?id=4831>

Gilbert, H 1997, Distributed Applications and the Web, last updated 10 January 1997, PC Lube and Tune, New Haven, CT, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://pclt.cis.yale.edu/pclt/WEBAPP/default.htm>

Internet 2006, last edited 1 February 2007, Wikipedia Foundation, Inc., n.a., viewed 4 March 2007, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet>

Softweb 2006, Using the Internet, last updated 19 January 2006, State of Victoria (Department of Education and Training, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/internet/>

Types of E-commerce 2005, last edited 19 September 2005, The State of Queensland (Department of State Development), Queensland, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://www.sd.qld.gov.au/dsdweb/v3/guis/templates/content/gui_cue_cntnhtml.cfm?id=4897>

What is a distributed application? 2006, last edited 9 June 2006, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://kb.iu.edu/data/adob.html>