A context-based collaboration supported framework for E-commerce PaaS platform

In an open e-commerce PaaS platform, there are many different kinds of applications, such as online stores, online payment systems and online logistics. For each of these application types, multiple applications are delivered by different ISVs and tenanted by e-commerce participants. Generally, there are frequent and extensive collaborations among the SaaS applications with multiple roles involved during trading processes. Such situations bring great challenges to traditional application interaction based on explicitly specified relationships and pre-defined interfaces, due to dynamic and uncertainty features of the collaborations among large number of potential applications. Current PaaS platform does not consider any mechanisms to support dynamic and uncertain collaborations among deployed SaaS applications at platform level. We propose an enhanced framework for e-commerce PaaS platform to support autonomous collaborations among deployed applications. Two software layers are constructed and incorporated into general PaaS platform, a collaboration-enabled layer and a component layer. In our framework, applications can be supported to collaborate with each other autonomously based on business goal and context. The framework also enables multiple roles perform corporative application development, deployment and utilization with higher efficiency and lower cost.