To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, we invited vendors to submit their business-to-business e-commerce tools for evaluation. We specified that a product must support business-to-business e-commerce transactions via the Internet or an extranet; automate publication of orders; accept orders via a prearranged schedule or a bidding process; issue purchase orders; track delivery and payment; be customizable via scripts, C/C++ or Java; and use a back-end database such as Oracle, SQL Server, Adaptive Server DB2 or generic Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) data source.

WebSphere Commerce Suite and Studio Developer win our Blue Ribbon Award for being. intuitive, fairly easy-to-use tools that let businesses create virtually any kind of e-commerce interface.

Four vendors accepted the challenge. IBM shipped us a late beta version of its WebSphere Commerce Suite 4.1 and Commerce Studio Developer Edition 4.1. Miva Corp. submitted its Merchant 2.0 and Empresa 3.63 products. Tomato Springs Software Corp. sent its ActiveCommerce Plus 1.0, and Macromedia supplied us with Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce Edition, which it recently acquired when it purchased Elemental Software.

Fifteen other vendors declined to let us examine and report on the quality of their products. Microsoft initially agreed to participate, then mysteriously failed to send anything. We concluded from the vendors' skittishness that most are not quite sure what business-to-business e-commerce should look like, or are reluctant to have their products undergo an impartial lab-based evaluation.

All four tools we tested can create storefront Web sites. Business-to-business e-commerce interfaces were a different story, however.

Building e-business interfaces

WebSphere Commerce Suite and Commerce Studio together contain everything you could possibly need to build a sophisticated e-commerce Web site with a variety of interfaces. Commerce Suite is an integrated combination that includes a customized Apache Web Server; WebSphere Payment Manager; a DB2 relational database; Net.Data, a Web-oriented macro language and database access tool; WebSphere application server, middleware that helps an e-commerce site scale across multiple servers; a JDK 1.1.7B Java run-time environment; Netscape Communicator, a Web browser; and XML templates. Developer Studio adds Store Creator; an applet designer; Visual Age for Java, a programming tool; a Java debugging tool; IBM HotMedia, a Web page visual design tool; and a CD-ROM of pictures and photographs.

We found WebSphere Commerce Suite and Studio to be serious tools for developing Web-enabled e-commerce sites and interfaces. Fortunately, they're intuitive and fairly easy to use. The tools made quick work of creating e-commerce Web sites that we connected to the included DB2 relational database management system via Net.Data. (WebSphere Commerce Suite also works with Oracle 8.)

In one test, we assembled a simple site that our simulated grocery store suppliers could use. With a mouse click, suppliers could bid on outstanding orders and promise fulfillment. In another, more complex test requiring quite a bit of Java programming, we designed a grocery store site and several supplier sites that exchanged XML interface files to communicate order fulfillment, delivery information, invoices and payment data.

IBM could have made this job easier if it had included its Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) product, MQSeries, as part of WebSphere Commerce Suite. With an Internet-aware MOM tool, we could have avoided the design and programming of the dialog control necessary to ensure the delivery of the Internet messages our grocery store application sent. Nonetheless, WebSphere Commerce Suite and Studio win our Blue Ribbon Award for the relative ease with which they enabled us to build business-to-business e-commerce interfaces.

In contrast to WebSphere Commerce Suite, Macromedia's Drumbeat 2000 required almost no programming expertise, but our tests showed it couldn't produce Web sites or interfaces as sophisticated as those built with WebSphere Commerce Suite. Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce Edition is tied inexorably to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology for dynamic Web page creation, which limits its scalability to a single platform, Windows NT. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect that an expert Microsoft Web platform programmer can tightly integrate a Drumbeat 2000 application with such Microsoft technologies as Transaction Server, Active Data Objects, Component Object Model (COM) and Distributed COM. However, Macromedia does not include a set of developer tools for creating sophisticated transactional Web-based applications as IBM does with WebSphere Commerce Suite and Commerce Studio. Then again, that disparity is reflected in price: Drumbeat is priced at $499, while WebSphere costs about 10 times as much.

For simple tasks, WebSphere Commerce Suite's wizards help programmers generate dynamic Web pages, Java Server Pages (JSP) scripts, JavaBeans, SQL statements and Java servlets. The product's applet designer is based on the NetObjects' BeanBuilder technology, and the included NetObjects' ScriptBuilder tool helps designers specify the layout of XML and Wireless Markup Language interface files. WebSphere Commerce Suite's design tools let us visually create e-commerce Web sites, maintain catalogs, set up shipping data, segregate grocery suppliers into groups (produce vs. meat, for instance), lay out our Web pages and define the relationships between the database and the Web pages and interface files.

Drumbeat 2000 uses ODBC to work with a variety of relational databases, and its site-creation and data access wizards are slick and well-designed. We especially liked the DataForm wizard, which built ASP-based Web pages containing drop-down menus, list boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons and text edit boxes when we connected it at design time to an already-populated Oracle database of catalog items.

Impressively, at run time, the generated ASP script navigated multiple rows of data as we scrolled forward and backward through the database. We found the Site Creation and Publishing wizard a painless but tedious tool for initially setting up storefront Web sites. To produce XML-formatted interface data from within Drumbeat, we programmed VBScript statements by hand.

Miva's Merchant basically just gives you a Web storefront-creation tool, while the Empresa Web server add-on brings an ASP-like server-side script capability to your Web server. The proprietary Miva Script language looks like a mixture of VBScript and XML. The Miva Engine within Empresa acts as a preprocessor for Web pages containing script statements and HTML. The scripting language offers ODBC access to re-lational databases and, if you don't have a relational DBMS, it has an internal xBase data access and data indexing mechanism.

The Merchant component consists of catalog access, product maintenance, category management, shopping basket, merchandising, and order and credit card processing. Over the Web, a central administrator can maintain multiple stores and delegate specific store maintenance functions to assistants. Merchant is itself written in Miva Script.

Miva Script uses what Miva calls Open Web Document Connectivity to provide access to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and Post Office Protocol 3 for sending and receiving e-mail from within a Miva-based application. Miva Script programs can also dynamically create or modify HTML for the Web server to deliver to a client browser. Within a script, HTML-like tags and system variables control database access as well as the content of Web pages, and blocks of script language statements can iterate through multiple database rows or HTML elements.

Like Miva's products, Tomato Springs Software's ActiveCommerce is essentially a simple Web storefront tool with few business-to-business features. It consists of three components: Catalog Maker, Order Maker and Order Taker. Catalog data resides in Microsoft Access MDB files. We used ActiveCommerce to publish a catalog on our extranet from which clients could order items, but the product did not verify in-stock quantities or handle electronic payments.

Managing the e-business

For security, all the products except ActiveCommerce offer the use of Secure Sockets Layer. WebSphere Commerce Suite and Drumbeat 2000 additionally can use the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol to protect credit card transactions from prying eyes and malicious damage. In the lab, both WebSphere Commerce Suite and Drumbeat 2000 sent correctly formatted SET transactions to a test payment gateway for decryption, translation, verification and authorization.

Miva Merchant-based applications can access United Parcel Service computers through the Web to calculate shipping fees worldwide. Of the four products, only WebSphere Commerce Suite supports the Joint Electronic Payment Initiative and electronic data interchange standards.

Within WebSphere Commerce Suite and Drumbeat 2000, you can specify that users must identify themselves, either by preregistration by the site administrator or via a registration process. In our tests, the e-commerce software products used the personalization data to sort suppliers demographically, track histories, and group suppliers by criteria such as on-time delivery and bid price.

In addition to Internet-based access, ActiveCommerce supports dial-up connections from customers. Instead of a shopping cart, ActiveCommerce uses a purchase-order metaphor to interact with customers. ActiveCommerce has the ability to create reusable templates of typical orders to increase customer efficiency. The product also has differential pricing by customer or class of customer. You can build different pricing models into the ActiveCommerce catalog and include a unique, private key with each model. ActiveCommerce prompts each user to enter his or her catalog key to know which pricing model to reveal.

While ActiveCommerce was the least capable business-to-business e-commerce product we evaluated, it did offer a simple-to-use data import tool for updating its catalog from comma-delimited external files. Moreover, Tomato Springs says that ActiveCommerce integrates with the Platinum for Windows accounting system for inventory control and order tracking. According to Tomato Springs, it replicates catalog data from the accounting system's inventory master into its own data store and routes sales orders to the accounting system's order-entry module.

Miva Merchant's installation process is difficult to follow and, for license verification via a Miva Web site, requires that the Merchant server be connected to the Internet. Installing WebSphere Commerce Suite from its eight CD-ROM disks was tedious but straightforward. Drumbeat 2000's and ActiveCommerce's installation steps were quick and simple.

Miva Merchant's documentation consists entirely of online manuals, the content of which is obscure and incomplete. ActiveCommerce comes with an amateurish quick-start manual of folded 8 1/2-by-11 laser-printer-produced pages, while Drumbeat 2000 and WebSphere Commerce Suite have professional-looking, comprehensive and well-written printed manuals.

Performance is important for high-volume sites that need to be as responsive as possible to business partner orders and delivery data. We found WebSphere Commerce Suite not only the fastest business-to-business e-commerce product but also the best at scaling across multiple servers. Both Drumbeat 2000 and ActiveCommerce lagged behind WebSphere Commerce Suite in our tests, typically taking about 50% more time to respond. In one test that used the Sniffer's network packet time stamps to reveal when requests and responses appeared on the network wire, a WebSphere Commerce Suite transaction took three seconds to complete, while similar Drumbeat 2000 and ActiveCommerce transactions required less than five seconds. Miva Merchant, written in Miva Script, proved the slowest of the lot, taking nearly seven seconds to complete the transaction.

Relationships between businesses are typically complex, and you'll want to analyze that complexity carefully before plunging into Internet-based e-commerce with your business partners. When you decide to build those interfaces, we strongly suggest you allocate some programming effort to the project and take a close look at IBM's WebSphere Commerce Suite and Commerce Studio.

How we did it

We created a Web-based virtual grocery store and multiple Web-based virtual suppliers. This would act as our business-to-business test environment.

We used the catalog products to build a database of more than 100 grocery items, testing their features by reordering those items from the store's suppliers. As the inventory of each item fell below a threshold, we published the item's specifications, quantity needed and delivery terms on an extranet. The lab-based supplier software applications we programmed responded by accepting or sometimes bidding for orders, arranging for delivery and issuing invoices. The grocery store issued purchase orders, tracked deliveries and paid for the items. The grocery store and the supplier applications we built produced reports showing current and completed transactions, fast- and slow-moving items, price trends and order status.

We looked for design-time features that helped us quickly build our business-to-business e-commerce interfaces. We evaluated how well and to what extent each product automated processing of Internet-based transactions with multiple suppliers.

Likewise, we wanted products to send and receive order, delivery and invoice transactions, preferably using XML. We also considered how well each product could accommodate unique bidding, ordering and delivery needs.

We gauged how easily we could use scripts, C/C++ or Java programming to customize a product's behavior, and we judged each product's integrated database for relational access, responsiveness, flexibility and robustness.

Preconfigured components for managing catalogs, bids, orders, shipping and payments were a plus, as were useful features such as the ability to specify minimum and maximum acceptable item prices, modify an interface's configuration without having to take it offline, accept a range of electronic payment types and produce useful reports.

At run time, we looked for correct and consistent processing of sales transactions as well as reliable operation. We also examined the network traffic each product generated, using Network Associates' Sniffer software to discover packet sizes, traffic densities, network utilization and time intervals between requests and responses.

In the performance tests, 30 clients concurrently supplied items to our e-commerce site while we closely monitored response times, server workloads and network utilization. For all tests, we rebooted both the Web server and the clients to eliminate the effect of caching on performance.

We ran each product on Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 5, using a Gate-way 2000 NS-8000 computer with 333-MHz Pentium II dual processors, 512M bytes of RAM and three 9G-byte SCSI RAID drives. A 100-MHz Fast Ethernet LAN was our extranet, and the 30 client PCs were a mixture of NT Workstation 4.0, Windows 98, OS/2 Warp 4.0 and Macintosh System 8 platforms.

Related links

Nance, a software developer and consultant for 29 years, is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th Edition (Que, 1997) and Client/Server LAN Programming (Que, 1994). Contact him at barryn@erols.com.

Nance also is a member of the Network World Test Alliance, a cooperative of the premier reviewers in the network industry, each bringing to bear years of practical experience on every review.

Interactive scorecard and NetResults
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Interactive Buyer's Guide
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Help for weary Webmasters
Review of web management tools: Ease your burden with tools that track site status, monitor server performance and identify trouble spots.
Network World, 12/07/98.

WebSphere Commerce Suite
IBM.

Open Market
Their e-business applications.

Breeze Commerce Studio
A new developer's toolkit for building XML-based business solutions.
VSI.

Miva's Merchant
E-Merchants are able to build and manage storefronts using nothing just a browser.

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