An eCommerce Site Backed by Web Services

• Due Date: Tue Dec 6, 2011 by 11:00 pm
• Team Size: min=2, max=4 students
• Technological Platform to be used: JEE

The Foods R Us Company is a consolidating retailer. It specializes in selling food items but it does not stock inventory. Instead, it takes purchase orders (P/O's) from its clients, consolidates them, and then procures them from business partners who stock the items and provide them wholesale; i.e. the partners do not venture into the retail market. In this business model, Foods R Us makes money by benefiting from volume discounts (due to consolidation) and by marking up wholesale prices. The latter factor, however, can backfire: if the markup is too high, the Company will not be competitive, and if it is too low, it becomes vulnerable to market fluctuations and this may lead to a net loss (by under-selling the suppliers). The Company has to deal with, and attempt to mitigate, this risk, and hence the need for sophisticated eCommerce technologies.

The sought system consists of two parts, one is B2C and the other B2B. Part 1 enables the Company's (human) clients to browse its catalog, add items to a shopping cart, and place orders. This part culminates in several P/O files stored on disk. Part 2 is non-interactive and runs as a scheduled job on a nightly or weekly basis depending on volume. Its input is the set of P/O files created by Part 1. It consolidates them by forming the union of the P/O's such that each item appears only once with a quantity equal to the sum of its quantities in all the P/O's. After creating the combined order, this part of the system connects to several web services and determines who supplies each item and at what price, optimizes the procurement, and places one or more order.

The relevant URL is red.cse.yorku.ca:port/eFcode (where eF stands for eFoods and code is the project's code assigned to your team). Send an email to Prof Roumani indicating the team members and the contact person and he will issue a team code for you. The Catalog servlet displays the catalog of the Company. It is up to you to determine how this display is done based on how much time you want to spend on this task and on how versatile you want your webapp to be. For example, you can at one extreme display all the items in one page; you can show the hierarchy by displaying only the categories and then the selected items; you can enable both direct and category-based access; you can have an express order form for those who know the item numbers; you can enable clients to bookmark pages; etc. Whatever you do, the client must be able to see the item's number, name, quantity per unit, and price. The client must also able to add an item to an initially empty shopping cart.

The Cart servlet must react by displaying the content of the shopping cart. The display should be tabular with one item per row. The table columns display the number, name, and unit price of each item in a read-only fashion. In addition, there should be a writable column for the desired quantity and a read-only one for the extended price (defined as the quantity times the unit price). The display should also indicate a total, a shipping cost ($5 that is waived for orders of $100 or more before taxes), HST (13% of total, including shipping if any), and a grand total. The page has three buttons: Update (to refresh the calculated fields after editing a quantity), Continue Shopping, and Checkout. Notice that if the entered quantity of an item is zero then it should be removed from the cart. You need to also handle the case of negative or non-numeric quantities.

Upon checkout or at anytime, a login form (normally transmitted over https) is served prompting for the client's account number and password. We are not going to switch to https in this project; instead, we will continue to use http. We assume that all clients have already established accounts with the Company; i.e. adding new clients is not within the scope of this project.

Upon checkout, the controller must ensure the client is logged in and must then display a confirmation screen followed by an acknowledgement that the the order has been accepted and is being processed. A URL that the client can visit at any time to view the created P/O must also be provided. See the next use case for details.

Upon confirmation of a P/O, the system stores its content in an XML file based on the PO.xsd schema. The name of the P/O file is derived from the account number of the client and the P/O number (a per-client serial number that starts at 1). For example, the the 3rd P/O of account number 12345, is: po12345_03.xml. Since this is an XML file, it needs to be transformed to XHTML before the client can see it. Note that this use case does not involve authentication.

In addition to the above use cases, it is recommended that your site supports the following uses: the ability to view the shopping cart from the catalog screen (i.e. without having to add an item); the ability to checkout from the catalog screen.

Add support for the following:

• Management wants to be able to determine the average time it takes a client to add an item to the cart and the average time between a fresh visit and checkout (in the same session). Provide a mechanism by which these two averages can be viewed in real time.
• And on an ad-hoc basis, Management may decide to advertise a certain item whenever a related item is added to the cart. As a proof of concept, activate this by cross selling 2002H712 whenever 1409S413 is added to the cart. Keep in mind that this functionality should not be part of the webapp since Management may withdraw it at any time (w/o recompiling).
• Add a search facility to enable clients to look for items.

This off-line, non-interactive system is ran nightly when the web server is down. It consolidates all the P/Os of the day to generate a procurement order: a list of all the needed items and the overall quantity needed for each. Next, it connects to the web services of three major Canadian wholesalers, one in Toronto, one in Vancouver, and one in Halifax. For each procurement item, it determines who has it, chooses the one with the lowest price, and places an order. No shipping charges or taxes are in scope here. When procurement is completed, it generates a procurement report (HTML) detailing the ordered items, the chosen wholesaler of each, and the winning bid price.

Placing an order requires a key. A unique key will be given to each team.

• Tables Category, Item, and Client in the CSE database

• The purchase order's schema. Here is a sample that adheres to the schema.

The following files describe the web services from which the company procures its products:

• The WSDL of the Toronto Wholesaler

• The WSDL of the Vancouver Wholesaler

• The WSDL of the Halifax Wholesaler

There are two deliverables:

1. A Project Report (described below)
2. A war file (make sure it includes source files)

These need to be delivered by the due date as follows:

1. Submit both by issuing the command: submit 4413 proj <file> where <file> is the report file or the project's war file. You can issue this command several times with each submission overwriting the older one. Issue submit -l 4413 proj to list what was successfully submitted.

1. Upload the war to http://red.cse.yorku.ca:4413 using the manager's facility (password the same as your own tomcat). Your app will auto deploy. If it does not run properly then the likely cause is a hard-coded path. You can fix the problem and re-upload as many times as needed (before the deadline) but make sure you stop or undeploy your webapp before re-uploading. Please do not undeploy someone's else webapp!

The report is meant to describe your execution of the project to someone who is familiar with the project, e.g. a fellow student who is also executing the same project and writing a similar report. Hence, the report should focus on your own experience and efforts, i.e. what you actually did, rather than on general description. It is expected to be very brief, to the point, and made up of at most ten pages of typed text and diagrams (excluding output samples and source listing).

The report should be packaged as one document (pdf or docx); should have page numbers; and should have a table of contents (TOC) in which all sections after the front material and listed along with their corresponding page numbers. The report consists of the following parts:

1. Front Material: A cover page (course number and name, date, project name, team); an optional dedication page; the TOC
2. Design: Describe your system's architecture and data flow briefly (diagrams are ideal here). Also, several design issues and decisions must have popped up during the analysis and design phases, e.g. MVC, namespaces, file formats, algorithms, representations, connecting B2B with B2C, etc. Describe in this sections the key issues and decisions that were made and why they were made the way they did.
3. Implementation: This is similar to the previous part but pertains to implementation issues and decisions. This section should also include Testing and Status. The former discusses how the project was tested and the latter lists each and every limitation or shortcoming of the finished webapp with respect to requirement.
4. The Team: Provide the cse# and name of each member of the team and indicate the contact person in case there are questions. It is essential that you explain how the work was divided and how was communication and consistency maintained. Include here the main lessons that were learned from this project.
5. Output Samples: These samples are for the B2B part. Select any XML P/O and include a listing of how it appears on disk and a screenshot of how it appears in the browser. Include also one completed procurement report showing: the items to procure, the consolidated quantity per item, the chosen wholesaler and price per item, and the confirmation codes obtained from the wholesalers web services.
6. The Source Code: Provide listing of all programs (including jspx, tags, xsl, web.xml, etc.). Partition this section into subsections, provide a title for each, and add an entry (with a page number) for each such subsection in the TOC. Make sure the code is properly formatted. Some editors do not format properly because they use spaces instead of tabs and/or use proportional fonts. Do not delay this step to the last minute; resolve it early on.

The project will be evaluated based (50%) on meeting the specs (both system functionality and report contents), (30%) on internal quality (design, style, code, etc.). The remaining (20%) is based on how your project compares with those of other teams.