The term e-commerce encompasses a spectrum of trading interactions from the business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions that facilitate Web-based retail trade, to business-to-business (B2B) data exchange that increases supply chain efficiency. This book shows how the Java platform and Java technologies can be, and have been, employed to develop solutions that address these scenarios.

To allow readers to gain a full appreciation of the diversity of topics involved in building e-commerce solutions, the book consists of five main sections. We begin by looking at the general area of e-business and the commercial considerations surrounding such application development. We then look at the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), XML, and XSLT. Building on this, we discuss the development of B2C sites for online selling and the design of effective portal sites. Our fourth section is devoted to the expanding area of B2B commerce where XML and XSLT are proving invaluable. Finally, we highlight new developments in the area of m-commerce and see how Java technologies can be used to facilitate trading anywhere. A particular feature of the book is the inclusion of case studies that provide hard won information on the challenges of building effective B2C and B2B applications in the real world.