Multipurpose Internet shopping basket

Electronic commerce on the Web is developing rapidly with more and more companies offering online shopping facilities, as Internet shopping baskets. But curiously, each server implements its own shopping basket, which makes impossible for a user to gather items from several sites into a single basket and then to commit atomically his whole purchase. This paper describes a Multipurpose Internet Shopping Basket, whose features include the gathering of items from several vendors sites, the atomicity of the purchase (all the items are bought, or none at all), the fault tolerance and the security of the process. The application is based on I-Transaction, which is a new transaction model, enhanced to cope with the Internet pitfalls. It integrates secure communications, authentication of users and non-repudiation of exchanges. In addition, it implements a secure distributed atomic commitment protocol to cope with failures. Thanks to the introduction of agencies in its architecture, the shopping basket application is scalable, with strong security features and efficient fault tolerance that make it attractive for large networks such as the Internet