Trading in distributed systems and match-making in electronic commerce systems are similar activities since both purport to evaluate some client constraint against a set of available offers, described in terms of properties. E-commerce systems, however, require additional flexibility to cope with frequently changing offers. Many properties of those offers are dynamic, i.e. their value has to be evaluated by an associated algorithm at match-making time.
The CORBA Trading Service specification provides the concept of dynamic properties. Maintenance and execution of dynamic property algorithms, however, are outside the scope of the standard. Hard-coding these algorithms does not provide a flexible enough method for dynamic property management. This paper presents the concept and design of a generic engine to represent and execute dynamic property evaluation algorithms. This concept brings about a number of benefits: An improved development environment, a simulation test-bed, improved management and maintenance, and structured way of linking to legacy systems.
By: A. Schade, C. Facciorusso, S. Field and Y. Hoffner
Published in: RZ3178 in 1999
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