promotions and consequently adapts the Store Front
layout. The Coordinator acts similarly for the best
sales: the Back-Store computes the five best sellers
and the Coordinator accordingly updates the Store-
Front.
Figure 11: Interface of E-Media DVD Section
Figure 11 describes the Store-Front interface
for the DVD section, i.e., when the “DVD” button of
the navigation-bar is activated. To search E-Media
DVD catalogue, the user must fill at least one field
of the search engine (1). The Store-Front sends the
query parameters to the Back Store which provides
the results back to the Store-Front (2). At any
moment during the session, the user can click on a
product (best seller, query result, shopping cart…), a
request is then sent to Back Store to provide more
information on this product (3). When the user
activates the billing process, the Billing-Processor
displays the items in the shopping cart and computes
the total and sub-total for each product. It then
checks the validity of the user’s credit card number.
4 CONCLUSION
Nowadays, software engineering for new enterprise
application domains such as eBusiness is forced to
build up open systems able to cope with distributed,
heterogeneous, and dynamic information issues.
Most of these software systems exist in a changing
organizational and operational environment where
new components can be added, modified or removed
at any time. For these reasons and more, agent
architectures are gaining popularity in that they do
allow dynamic and evolving structures which can
change at run-time.
Architectural design has received
considerable attention for the past decade which has
resulted in a collection of well-understood
architectural styles and formal architectural
description languages. Unfortunately, this work has
focuses on object-oriented rather than agent-oriented
systems. This paper has described an approach based
on organizational styles and an agent architectural
description language we have defined to design
agent architectures in the context of e-commerce
system engineering. The paper has proposed a
validation of the framework: it has been applied to
develop E-Media, an e-commerce platform
implemented on the JACK agent development
environment.
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