Exploiting an event-based system to develop a distributed e-commerce infrastructure

In the last few years the event-based paradigm has been largely studied and considered as a promising approach to develop the communication infrastructure of distributed systems. It is particularly interesting when easy reconfiguration and decoupling among components is required. In fact, it allows events to be propagated in a way that is completely hidden to the component that has generated them as well as to the receivers. As a consequence, a component can operate in the system without being aware of the existence of other components. Also, it is always possible to plug a component in and out of the architecture without affecting the other components directly. These two effects guarantee a high compositionality and reconfigurability of a software architecture. In the context of this paper we report our experience in exploiting the event-based paradigm to develop an e-commerce platform called OPELIX.