Book Review : Professional Java E-Commerce

If you are a Java developer and looking to get into E-Commerce then this book is for you. First section is about 'The E-Commerce Landscape'. It describes what is E-Commerce and how to plan and manage E-Commerce projects. Although I think devoting three chapters in this section is a bit too much but none the less this section did give me some information I didn't had before. Second section is about 'Architecting Java Based E-Commerce Systems'. Now this is where the book really starts. After having laid down the basics of E-Commerce, B2B, B2C, M-Commerce etc, it now describes how Java as a technology can be used to architect E-Commerce systems. This section also describes what different technologies are made available by J2EE and how each of these can be used in conjunction to build fast, secure, highly scalable and fault tolerant E-Commerce systems. First two sections help build concept about J2EE and E-Commerce, rest of the book builds on these concepts to actually demonstrate building E-Commerce systems with J2EE.

Third section is about 'B2C E-Commerce Solutions' and contains seven chapters on issues related with building B2C E-Commerce sites. B2C means selling goods online. This section covers everything in detail about building store fronts and portal sites.

Fourth section is about 'B2B E-Commerce Solutions' and contains eight chapters. Now this section is huge and in my opinion is the best section of all. B2B E-Commerce is definitely an elephant of it's own kind, and this section describes it all. It focuses on the use of technologies such as EJB, JMS, JAXP, XML, XSLT to build scalable and secure E-Commerce systems. In almost all the examples in this section XML has been used a lot to transfer data between different tiers and E-Commerce systems. It then moves on to describe how to use XSLT transformations in JSP and Servlets to show XML data in standard HTML format. These is a separate chapter on 'Internet Application Service Providers'.

Fifth section is about 'M-Commerce'. M-Commerce stands for 'Mobile Commerce' and is definitely the future of buying and selling online. It contains two chapters, first one describes technologies used for M-Commerce and then how to use Java to build WAP enabled web sites. Second chapter is on 'Smart Cards'.

In my opinion you should buy this book straight away if you are into and or want to get into building E-Commerce systems using Java.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Section 1 - The E-Commerce Landscape
  • Chapter 1: Defining E-Commerce
  • Chapter 2: Requirements for E-Commerce Systems
  • Chapter 3: Planning the Project
• Section 2 - Architecting Java-Based E-Commerce Systems
  • Chapter 4: Architecting E-Commerce Applications
  • Chapter 5: J2EE for E-Commerce Applications
  • Chapter 6: Approaches for E-Commerce Applications
  • Chapter 7: Delivering Data and Data Transformation - XML/XSLT
  • Chapter 8: Security
• Section 3 - B2C E-Commerce Solutions
  • Chapter 9: B2C E-Commerce: Simple Site to Sell Goods Online
  • Chapter 10: B2C E-Commerce: Site Usability
  • Chapter 11: B2C E-Commerce: Client Issues
  • Chapter 12: B2C E-Commerce: Extending the Simple Site
  • Chapter 13: In the Marketplace A - B2C with WebLogic and WLCS
  • Chapter 14: B2C E-Commerce: Portal Site
  • Chapter 15: In the Marketplace B - A Customizable Portal Architecture
• Section 4 - B2B E-Commerce Solutions
  • Chapter 16: B2B E-Commerce: B2B Foundations
  • Chapter 17: B2B E-Commerce: Integrating Supply Chains
  • Chapter 18 B2B E-Commerce: Transformation
  • Chapter 19: B2B E-Commerce: Mass Integration
  • Chapter 20: In the Marketplace C - Supply Chain Integration
  • Chapter 21: B2B E-Commerce: Internet Application Service Providers
  • Chapter 22: B2B E-Commerce: Inter-Company Workflow
  • Chapter 23: In the Marketplace D - Corporate Purchasing
• Section 5 - M-Commerce
  • Chapter 24: Technologies for M-Commerce
  • Chapter 25: Smart Cards
• Section 6 - Appendices
  • Appendix A: XML Primer
  • Appendix B: XSLT Primer
  • Appendix C: XML and XSL Files for Chapter 7
  • Appendix D: Hexadecimal Conversion Charts
  • Appendix E: Extract from the Loebner Competition Transcript
  • Appendix F: Package Diagrams for the B2B XML-to-Object Broker Application
• Index