A Method of E-Commerce Trading Process Construction Based on PaaS Platform

E-commerce applications is a typical scale collaborative application, which includes many complex trading processes and small applications, such as portals of buyers and sellers, product management, online payment and billing, logistics system, and so on. But it is a challenge to develop such large-scale collaborative application using traditional method starting from scratch, since many application collaboration technologies should be solved, such as application collaboration relationship management and customization, collaboration application execution scheduling, and so on. Cloud and PaaS (Platform as a Service) service model provide a new opportunity for this problem solution. So, a method of trading process construction based on PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform supporting applications collaboration is proposed. Both ISV and ecommerce operator can construct collaborative applications easily. This method contains two aspects: one is the application collaboration semantic meta-model, the other is the method of trading process construction. The application collaboration semantic meta-model is used to be a container in e-commerce PaaS to specify each kind of E-commerce application attributes and relationships between one application and the others. Based on the application collaboration semantic meta-model, PaaS platform can automatically construct a whole customized e-commerce collaboration application according to e-commerce operators´ requirements. This method is based on HTN (Hierarchical Task Network) planning theory. In the end, through cases analysis, the proposed PaaS platform and method is proved to construct a variety of collaboration applications easily based on the application collaboration semantic meta-model.