Enabling tools for E-commerce

Electronic commerce (EC) is a combination of practices, strategies, processes, applications and technologies, enabling business transactions. This paper focuses on software and technologies for EC. In the first part, the different categories of applications for EC are reviewed. A fully integrated solution does not seem to be the major trend. However the "best of breed" approach implies an integration problem. The second part of the paper includes modeling languages and EC applications core technologies. The UML appears to be used at different levels in the development Of all EC solution. Web technologies are continually evolving: XML could be the language of the,future for information exchanges between heterogeneous applications. The third part deals with component and application integration. In spite of converging standards for languages as well as for models, system interoperability is a major problem, when informations are to be shared and processes to be jointed. Two major trends can be identified : Web services and EDI approaches.