Using
Visual Basic and Oracle Version 8i relational database, and a
combination of Active Server Pages, BEA Systems' WebLogic
5.0 application server and Java 1.1.7B code, we developed the
client and server sides of two business-to-business order-fulfillment
environments. As the need arose, we used additional development
tools, such as Visual C++.
The
network software tools we used to support our applications were
IBM's MQSeries and Advanced Program-to-Program Communications;
Candle's MQSecure; Microsoft's Windows Load Balancing
Service, Transaction Server, SNA Server, SQL Server, Message Queue
Server and COM Transaction Integrator for CICS; Lightspeed Systems'
Total Control for E-commerce IPMagic; and Lucent's VitalSuite.
Our
first scenario simulated software-managed, on-demand purchase
of office supplies. The office-supply vendors were Windows- and
Intel-based, like us. Our inventory database contained over 100
items, and we set up multiple suppliers for each item.
For
the automotive supplier, our plan specified that the auto parts
vendor use an AS/400 computer running OS/400, but we used Communications
Manager/2 (CM/2), running on OS/2 Warp, to act as the AS/400 side
of our SNA LU 6.2 sessions in the lab. You couldn't tell
by looking at the SNA messages on the wire the kind of computer
they'd come from.
Our
server components ran on Windows NT Server 4.0 (Service Pack 5),
using three Gateway 2000 NS-8000 computers with 333-MHz Pentium
II dual processors, 512M bytes of RAM and three 9G-byte SCSI RAID-5
drives. Client software ran on a mixture of 30 NT Workstation
4.0, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 98, OS/2 Warp 4.0 and
Macintosh System 8 platforms. Three 100M bit/sec Fast Ethernet
local networks, linked by leased lines, frame relay and VPNs,
connected our servers and clients. Each WAN link used Cisco 4700
routers and VeriLink WANsuite 5160 DSU/CSUs.
In
each extranet environment, we set up a business-to-business order-fulfillment
environment and sent and received order, delivery and invoice
transactions. Each office-supply vendor responded to our request
messages with confirmation messages and, periodically, invoice
messages.
The
second and much more critical environment procured auto parts
from a primary vendor, on demand, for a simulated auto manufacturing
plant. In automated form, it let us order parts, schedule deliveries,
see how many of each part were in stock, trigger the manufacturing
of new parts when stocks ran low, and receive the vendor's
invoices. We experimented with proprietary dialogs we designed
ourselves and XML-based dialogs. We considered how well each product
let us customize our automated business relationships to accommodate
unique business requirements for bidding, ordering and delivery
needs.
We
examined the network traffic each product and approach caused,
using Network Associates' Sniffer software to discover packet
sizes, traffic densities, network utilization and time intervals
between requests and responses.
