Steady growth in electronic commerce (e-commerce) continues. The audience for Shurety’s book is Web site designers and developers and information technology managers charged with evaluating or implementing an e-commerce solution using IBM’s product Net.Commerce. For this purpose, this book is superb. It is a comprehensive guide to e-commerce and to the product, filled with easy-to-read gray-scale screenshots, HTML layouts, C++ functions, Net.Data macros (Net.Data is an IBM product for connecting a Web server to a database server), and DB2 Universal Database table definitions. The level of documentation is consistent with a detailed tutorial. The many examples and exercises, and the 60-day trial product provided on a CD for NT Server 4.0, make this text a natural choice for a university or corporate course in electronic commerce for developers. The examples cover both NT and AIX. Given the time and energy, it would be possible to discover all the essential components of an electronic commerce site by studying the features of this product.

Although well written and beautifully prepared, this material is not for beginners in computing. The problem is that, in e-commerce, we are all beginners. All readers--both beginners and advanced staff--will be challenged by the C++ classes, HTML macros, and HTTP processes. The difficulty can only be relieved by the addition to the product (and then to the text) of even more GUI interfaces and wizards. Although a future version of Net.Commerce is expected to support Java programming, the book says nothing about this. Furthermore, although Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant Oracle databases are mentioned, there is no mention of support for Microsoft SQL Server. Perhaps the developers think that DB2 UDB makes SQL Server unnecessary; more likely, if the integration with the back-end fails for any reason, the product’s reputation will suffer, so why take the risk?

With over 60 DB2 tables documented in detail in Appendix C and discussed in almost every chapter, this is truly a data-driven architecture and processing approach. Tables are used to store information about shoppers, users, merchants, stores, shopper groups, customers, categories, products, items, prices, discounts, shipping, taxes, orders, system functions, commands, and access control.

After an introductory chapter about electronic business strategy, the text delves into creating a single site or a complete shopping mall, and then discusses mass-importing product and category data. The audience for much of this material is chief server administrators, webmasters, and database administrators.

Building dynamic store pages that extract data from the database is covered in a tutorial on Net.Data. There is some tight coupling here, and developers will need to know which fields map to the database tables and which do not. The dynamic pages are managed by Net.Data macros, which are registered in the database.

Commands in Net.Commerce map to business processes such as OrderProcess or AddressUpdate. Commands are invoked as HTTP requests, which return HTML documents to the user interface. Net.Commerce supports SET and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) as well as payment options from CyberCash and Verifone. Commands invoke tasks, which are implemented as functions in C++. Functions are overridable through a documented API. This means that virtually any imaginable business process is customizable. If this sounds complex, it is. Thus, seven chapters are devoted to programming conventions, planning, writing, testing, and implementing commands and functions.

An especially remarkable aspect is the Product Advisor--an intuitive product search feature that is covered in Appendix A. It uses various shopping metaphors to guide customers through a series of customizable questions. Presumably, such aspects as price and product features will be used by the Sale Assistant to select products that match customer-supplied criteria.

Finally, although the examples in the narrative and tutorials are about consumer shopping, the Net.Commerce workflow also allows business-to-business commerce. Such features as the shopper group table mean that discounts or premiums can be applied to different groups of business shoppers. Furthermore, those submitting the orders can be distinguished from those approving the orders, which is essential for dealing with corporate clients. Naturally, the tradeoff for this degree of flexibility and extensibility is the complexity of the customization required. Learn about all the required details here.