Developing Distributed and E-Commerce Applications [Anglais] [Broché]

This book had its genesis in a book I started writing in 1999 and never finished. The book was about distributed systems: their architectures, their components and how they are deployed. I decided to abandon the effort, although some of the original material can be found embedded within this book. My decision was made for two reasons: first, there are a number of good books on distributed systems, for example the book written by Colouris et al. 1, and I felt that to better them would take me a considerable amount of time; and, second, and almost certainly the more important reason, that distributed applications — particularly those associated with e-business and e-commerce — were becoming increasingly important.

This book is about developing applications using the facilities provided by distributed system software; in particular those facilities offered by the Internet. The book is introductory. If you are looking for a broad overview of the subject then I would hope that you would consider this book. If you are looking for a detailed treatment of a particular topic, for example XML, then this is not the book for you; there are excellent books published by Wrox and O'Reilly and others, which run to many hundreds of pages.

I have targeted this book at two audiences. The first is undergraduates studying a computing or IT course at a university. There is a paucity of good texts which introduce e-business, e-commerce and distributed applications and I hope this one fills the gap. The second audience is that of staff in industry who are thinking of moving into the new areas described by this book, for example staff working in real-time computing who are increasingly required to interface their systems with Internet-based applications.

There are a number of features of the book (which comes with a CD that contains its text, the exercises and Web links) such as: There is a series of programming exercises dotted throughout the book. You will find a brief outline of these exercises in the margins of the appropriate page. The text of the exercises together with the supporting software can be found on the CD which comes with the book. Most of these exercises require a small amount of programming and provide a sort of proof of concept of the technologies detailed in the book. There is a series of Web links displayed in the margins of the book. These links will take you to a further collection of links on a particular topic, for example XML. I have carefully chosen these links so that, in the main, they point at introductory and tutorial material which the reader can use to supplement and extend the basic material found in the book. I estimate that there are some thing like 700 links associated with the book. There are also many tinted boxes and marginal notes and these act as a form of footnote where material not directly relevant to the text but of an interesting nature can be found. There is a major case study which appears as Chapter 17. This describes the use of the majority of technologies detailed in the book applied to an e-commerce application: that of a company selling an item of software. You can access this case study in two ways. You can either read through the first 16 chapters and then read the case study, doing the exercises associated with it, or you can access chunks of the case study after reading a particular chapter. A marginal note at the end of the chapter will direct you forward to the relevant section of Chapter 17. A set of Powerpoint slides are available to help the instructor to associate lectures and class discussions to material in the textbook. They can be found at booksites.

I have chosen the programming language Java as the medium for discussing many of the technologies. I make no apology for this: in a few years it has become the main Internet programming language and the language of choice as an introductory programming language within our universities. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Java picked up from an industrial training course or a first-year undergraduate course will gain maximum advantage from the book.

At the time of writing this preface the world of e-commerce is undergoing change; it is clear that the huge hype of the last year has decreased and sense returned to the area. E-business still booms and increasingly conventional systems are being interfaced with commercially distributed applications. Whatever the current state of e-commerce and e-business, what is clear is that computing will never be the same again. New techniques and technologies are now being used to connect distributed sub-systems together to enable a functionality we only dreamed of five years ago; I hope that this book will act as an introduction to this exciting area. Darrel Ince
Milton Keynes, 2001