Design of a framework for electronic commerce brokers

The abundance of specialized electronic brokers (e-brokers) combined with the complexity of their design phase reinforce the need for a reusable design for e-brokers. This paper presents an e-broker framework, a reusable object-oriented design that captures several e-brokers' behaviour. The framework is expressed in F-UML, a design language that visually distinguishes between the parts common in all e-broker applications and the parts adaptable when deriving a specific e-broker from the framework. The paper briefly presents F-UML. It then focuses on the design process. Finally, it highlights the difficulties, advantages and limits of the proposed design method.