CSE-409

E-Commerce & Web Engineering

Lecture -05

Golam Mahmud
Lecturer, Dept. of CSE, DIU
Key business concepts and strategies applicable to e-commerce:
E-commerce has had a major impact on the business environment in the last decade, and
have affected:
•Industry structure—the nature of players in an industry and their relative bargaining
power by changing the basis of competition among rivals, the threat of new substitute
products, the strength of suppliers, and the bargaining power of buyers.
•Industry value chains—the set of activities performed in an industry by suppliers,
manufacturers, transporters, distributors, and retailers that transform raw inputs into final
products and services by reducing the cost of information and other transaction costs.
•Firm value chains—the set of activities performed within an individual firm to create
final products from raw inputs by increasing operational efficiency
•Business strategy—a set of plans for achieving superior long-term returns on the capital
invested in a firm by offering unique ways to differentiate products, obtain cost
advantages, compete globally, or compete in a narrow.
 E-commerce Business Strategy: A business strategy is a set of plans for achieving
superior long-term returns on the capital invested in a business firm. A business
strategy is therefore a plan for making profits in a competitive environment over the
long term. There are five generic business strategies:
•Differentiation— refers to all the ways producers can make their products or services
unique and distinguish them from those of competitors.
•Commoditization—a situation where there are no differences among products or
services, and the only basis of choosing is price.
•Strategy of cost competition— means a business has discovered some unique set of
business processes or resources that other firms cannot obtain in the marketplace.
•A scope strategy— is a strategy to compete in all markets around the globe, rather
than merely in local, regional, or national markets.
•A focus/market niche strategy— is a strategy to compete within a narrow market
segment or product segment. This is a specialization strategy with the goal of
becoming the premier provider in a narrow market.
 Web Application

A website is a collection of static files(webpages) such as HTML

pages, images, graphics etc.

A Web application is a website with dynamic functionality on the

server. Google, Facebook, Twitter are examples of web applications.
 HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
HTTP is a protocol that clients and servers use on the web to
communicate.
It is similar to other internet protocols such as SMTP(Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol) and FTP(File Transfer Protocol) but there is one
fundamental difference.
HTTP is a stateless protocol i.e HTTP supports only one request per
connection. This means that with HTTP the clients connect to the
server to send one request and then disconnect. This mechanism
allows more users to connect to a given server over a period of time.
The client sends an HTTP request and the server answers with an HTML
page to the client, using HTTP.
 HTTP Methods

HTTP requests can be made using a variety of methods, but the ones
you will use most often are Get and Post. The method name tells the
server the kind of request that is being made, and how the rest of the
message will be formatted.
 HTTP Methods and Descriptions :

Method Name Description

OPTIONS Request for communication options that are available on the request/response
chain.
GET Request to retrieve information from server using a given URI.
HEAD Identical to GET except that it does not return a message-body, only the
headers and status line.
POST Request for server to accept the entity enclosed in the body of HTTP method.
DELETE Request for the Server to delete the resource.
CONNECT Reserved for use with a proxy that can switch to being a tunnel.
PUT This is same as POST, but POST is used to create, PUT can be used to create
as well as update. It replaces all current representations of the target resource
with the uploaded content.
 Difference between GET and POST requests

GET Request POST Request

Data is sent in header to the server Data is sent in the request body

Get request can send only limited amount of data Large amount of data can be sent.

Get request is not secured because data is Post request is secured because data
exposed in URL is not exposed in URL.
Get request can be bookmarked and is more Post requests cannot be bookmarked.
efficient.
 Introduction to Servlet
A servlet is a Java programming language class that is used to extend the capabilities of
servers that host applications accessed by means of a request-response programming
model. Although servlets can respond to any type of request, they are commonly used to
extend the applications hosted by web servers.

Servlet Technology is used to create web applications. Web applications are helper
applications that reside at the webserver and build dynamic web pages. A dynamic page
could be anything like a page that randomly chooses a picture to display or even a page
that displays the current time.
 Advantages of using Servlets

• Servlets are scalable.

• Servlets are robust and object-oriented.
• Servlets are platform-independent.
• Less response time because each request runs in a separate
thread.
Thank you!