Distributed print on demand systems in the Xpect framework
The Internet is an extremely rich source of online information and services. However, complex client requests, involving and combining several types of services, are difficult to handle without some form of support. This is particularly true in the case of electronic commerce, where complex transactions may involve several independent good providers, bankers, delivery services, etc. Hence the need for "brokering" services, whose offers combine in the best possible way offers coming from existing, specialized services publicly available on the Net, in order to match customers' constraints. The Xpect framework for electronic commerce has been developed for that purpose. In this paper, we illustrate it through a case study in the context of distributed print-on-demand. We propose an architecture and implementation of the case study based on CLF, a distributed application development tool relying on a rich object model and its corresponding coordination scripting facility.
print-on-demand multi-agent negotiation electronic commerce brokering workflow