Application framework issues when evolving business applications for electronic commerce

Abstract When an organization embarks on e-commerce it rarely has a chance to re-engineer its existing business applications. However, if these business applications were built using an application framework, then one might hope to reuse many of the existing legacy applications in the new e-commerce context. How much of the original application can be reused, and how much does the original application framework have to evolve in order to support this reuse? This paper describes our experience with evolving our framework for building engineered-product business applications so that these applications can be delivered over the Internet. We discuss the general issues created by migrating applications to e-commerce, and identify architectural concerns for application frameworks that must support e-commerce.