Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable and Available Middleware Technology in Mobile E-Commerce Environment

As the use of the Internet and mobile communication becomes popular, the
combination of these two technologies has brought many novel applications into the
real world. The so-called mobile e-commerce is one of them.
However, it's not easy to convert a legacy client-server style system into
Internet-compliance. The Internet clients can be worldwide. The system must have
high availability to provide continuous services. Furthermore, the rapid development
of new technology makes the life cycle of one system even shorter. As a result, it's
important to put scalability and maintainability into consideration when constructing the system architecture. In this project, we make use of the distributed object
technology to design and implement the multi-tier system architecture. By building
different function levels in the multi-tier fashion, high system scalability can be
achieved. Furthermore, because of the ease of component replacement, building the
system by distributed objects is also beneficial in the maintenance and upgrades of the
system. At the same time, we aim at providing the system with high availability. It is
achieved by using the component-level fault-tolerant group technique.
During this year we will finish the decision-making logic and flow-control logic
of the middleware in the trading system. The high system availability and scalability
is achieved by using fault-tolerant CORBA components.