Elevator Pitch 2

Finally, here we are in the closing stage of ITC 594 subject; we have studied many concepts and terms in association with e-system infrastructure development, including: E-commerce, distributed systems, database and application servers, system security, system design and mobile computing. Progress along this journey has been detailed in this blog which has proved both useful and enlightening

My studies have reinforced, for me, the importance of XML as a core component in systems integration and web services. I have learned about threads and concurrency as a way to optimize a system/server's performance.

Of particular interest was the section on bots, agents, spiders and mobile computing. Intelligent Mobile software agents seem to me to really epitomize the concept of "distributed computing".

Coming into this subject I didn’t know what to expect and though it was going to another theory based subject, but overall I found it to be educational, informative and most of all enjoyable.

So in conclusion I say let look forward to the future of the internet and embrace all the prospective advancements that will come with it.

Exercise 16 : Systems Integration

1. Choose ONE of the four ways to manage and develop integrated systems as listed below:
• XML and Web services as the glue
• Business process analysis
• Federated databases
• Portal and service-oriented architecture (SOA)

Exercise 15 : M-commerce: Innovation and mobile devices

1. What is meant by a location based service? Explain using the Web applications found on a late model mobile device.

Location-based services (LBS) is a service accessible via a mobile device that utilises the device’s geographical position. The location of the device can be determined by a number of ways including positioning based upon mobile-phine towers, GSM localisation and GPS.

Exercise 14 : Searching mechanisms, virtual worlds and cyberagents

1. What is a spider? What does it do?

A spider (a.k.a web crawler) is a type of bot or software agent that automatically indexes web pages for internet search engines. Spiders may also be used to perform hyperlink validation.

Exercise 13 : Shopping cart specifications

Develop the class diagram for the following shopping cart specifications:

A shoppingCart object is associated with only one creditCard and customer and to items in itemToBuy object. Persistent customer information such as name, billing address, delivery address, e-mail address and credit rating is stored in the customer object. The credit card object is associated with a frequentShopper discount object, if the credit rating for the customer is good. The customer can make or cancel orders as well as add and delete items to the shopping cart product. The creditCard object contains the secure method for checking that the charge is authentic.

Exercise 12 : Modelling with UML or MVC?

Examine the Use Case in Figure 4 and explain the MVC architecture of the online bookstore (the model the view and controllers) needed to Lookup Books and Add to Shopping Cart.



Lookup Books (104)
Model: Lookup Books
View: Book Search page, Book Search Result page
Controller: Book Search Controller

Customers input search strings in the Book Search page.
The Book Search Controller passes the searching criteria to Lookup Books for processing and redirects the display to Book Search Result page.
While rendering of the view, Model will be requested to display the search result.

Add to Shopping Cart (105)
Model: Add to Shopping Cart
View: Add to Shopping Cart page, Shopping Cart Result page
Controller: Add to Shopping Cart Controller

Customers input books information in the Add to Shopping Cart page.
The Add to Shopping Cart Controller passes the book information to Add to Shopping Cart for processing and redirects the display to Shopping Cart Result page.
While rendering of the view, Model will be requested to display the result.

Exercise 11 : TP monitors and transaction protocols

1. Give a description in your own words of the ACID properties of a transaction.

Atomicity:

All or nothing. The transaction is only committed if every part of it was successful otherwise it is completely rolled back.

Consistency:

Only data that satisfies database consistency rules, such as the logical relationships between data and transactions, and referential integrity, may be committed.

Isolation:

Changes being made to data by a transaction, prior to being committed, are isolated from other transactions.

Durability:

Any committed updates made by a transaction cannot be lost or rolled back.

Exercise 10 : Concurrency and Threading demonstration in Python

1. Find definitions for eight terms and concepts used in threaded programming:

Thread Synchronisation is the methodology of managing concurrently executing threads and control their access to data, memory and code segments.

Exercise 9 : Electronic payments and security

1. Find out about SET and the use of RSA 128-bit encryption for e-commerce.

Secure Electronic Transaction (SET)

SET is an open standard security protocol for protecting the privacy, and ensuring the authenticity and integrity, of electronic transactions. SET uses digital certificates, signatures and wallets to conduct a series of security checks to authenticate credit card transactions. It was developed in the late 1990s by SETco a company formed by VISA and MasterCard and others, including IBM, Microsoft and Netscape. Despite this backing the protocol has failed to be widely implemented due to its cost, complexity and the need to install additional client software.