An implementation of electronic shopping cart on the Web system using component-object technology

Abstract

Proposes a new mechanism for implementing an electronic shopping cart system system on the World Wide Web. The shopping cart system is a typical client-server system, and it includes the essential tasks to be implemented in a typical Web-based client-server system. The most important task is to maintain context data between successive user sessions. Although several methods which can be applied to implement the shopping cart system on the Web system have been proposed, none of them can attain the task of maintaining context data sufficiently. In this paper, we analyze the task and point out the following difficulties: (1) reliability, (2) safety and (3) session management. We then propose a new mechanism, called the context data storage (CDS) mechanism, to solve all of the above difficulties. In the proposed CDS mechanism, the context data for the session management is stored in the main memory of the client computer. As a result, the CDS mechanism can achieve both high reliability and high safety, as well as the capability of managing tuser sessions. Next, we use component object technology to implement the CDS mechanism. Then, we compare the performance of the shopping cart system using the proposed CDS mechanism with one using the previous methods. The results show that our proposed mechanism has solved all of the above difficulties (1), (2) and (3) and has attained efficient communications between clients and Web servers.