Supporting Interactive and Collaborative Product Configuration for Internet Commerce

Customers nowadays commonly select product and make purchases on the internet. In the process they often want to make limited changes to the configuration of the product, perhaps in collaboration or consultation with a product support engineer. Currently very few e-commerce applications can provide Such flexibility to the customers. This paper describes the design and implementation of such a system. The collaboration agent, Co-assembler, enables casual customers and designers to design and perform configurations of 3D products collaboratively over the internet. Clients using Co-assembler through a Java enabled web browser have been developed using platform independent Java language which can run the application everywhere. A three-tier client-server approach facilitates communication between clients and server.