E0 239 : Electronic commerce Y. Narahari Electoronic Enterprises Laboratory Department of Computer Science and Automation Indian Institute of Science Bangalore - 560 012 INDIA

VIPANI is a naive web-based marketplace that enables selling agents and buying agents to do trading. The business model followed by VIPANI is described in detail in the article on Kasbah that can be downloaded. The agents register themselves first. Each buying agent sends its "bid" in the form of price curves to VIPANI. Similarly, each selling agent sends its "ask" which is also in the form of price curves. Bids and asks are sent to VIPANI as XML messages. VIPANI maintains an appropriate database that contains details of registered agents, their bids, and asks. The trading algorithm used by VIPANI follows the matching algorithm described in the Kasbah paper.

At any point of time, there could be multiple buying agents and multiple selling agents transacting business. You will have to think about some interesting issues that could arise because of multiple agents transacting business at the same time.

VIPANI has two types of actors: selling agent and buying agent. It is required to design and implement VIPANI. Create a use case diagram followed by a class diagram. Use PGSQL database and a standard web server. You will to handle all messages as XML messages.

Notes on XML messaging: You have to use xml messaging between client(that is, web browser) and the server, for communication among agents(that is, software agents), and for communication between server and agents. You can use 'java script' at client side to create xml messages. At server side and at agents, you can use java (String or StringBuffer) to do the same. There are several xml parsers available (DOM,SAX, JAXP, to name a few) freely on web. You can use any of them to parse the xml messages. All the communication between client and server is supposed to be through xml messages only. And any communication among the agents (that is buying agents and selling agents) and between server and agents should also be through xml messaging.

The deadline for this assignment is February 1, 2006 (Wednesday). The demos will be on February 4th and 5th.