Reseda E-Shop: Planning, Design and Implementation of an online-Shop for Reseda Engineering

Master Thesis in Informatics 2006

Beat Raess

Professor : Prof. Jacques Pasquier-Rocha, Assistant : Dr. Patrik Fuhrer

July 2006

Abstract

Reseda is a new company in the furniture business. The enterprise is divided into Reseda Engineering, responsible for the design, development and marketing of the products, and Reseda Home, concerned with the production and sale. The Reseda E-Shop master project consists of the planning, design and implementation of an online shop and website for Reseda Engineering.

An online shop, internet shop, webshop or online store is “an electronic commerce application used for B2B or B2C” [Wikipedia], which serves to sell products or services over the internet. As such, an online shop is part of the e-commerce field of the e-business framework.

The two primary objectives of the Reseda E-Shop application are the presentation of the company’s products on the website and the possibility for online orders and consultings. Further features include general company information (company, employees, products, factory, showroom), contact possibilities (address and email, email form, address form), news (online news, newsletter, rss feed), customer account (customer data, orders, consultings) and support options (Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), general terms, legal notice, links). All these storefront features of the online shop can be managed online in the storeback area.

In order to fulfill the objectives of the e-shop, the design of the application needs to be clean, modular, extensible and well documented. As a consequence, the project relies on Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, design patterns and frameworks. The application is based on a multi-tier architecture using Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and implemented with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Struts and Hibernate, as well as various other frameworks (e.g. OSCache, FOP, JDOM, POI, ROME) and tools (e.g. Ant, XDoclet).

This report covers the necessary business background required for the project, it includes the application’s specification as well as notes concerning the involved technology and the implementation. In addition to the report, also manuals for the e-shop’s features, administration and management tasks are available.

Visit the e-shop (available as from September 2006)

The Reseda web site: http://www.resedahome.ch