Multi-Tenant and Multi-Vendor Based E-Commerce Platform Using Spring Framework and Restful Web Services

Abstract

This paper details the high level architecture and design principles that are being used in the development of the new e-commerce system. One of the goals that we are looking at in the near future is to provide the entire ecommerce as a platform which can host other tenants in addition to a web portal.

The goals of this architecture are to attain

• High availability,
• Scalability,
• Extensibility and
• Maintainability

Keeping in mind the above goals a decision was made to go with REST services based light weight J2EE architecture. This e-commerce platform has an advantage of dealing with multiple tenants as well as with multiple vendors. Each tenant can have multiple vendors with a set of business services. These business services were given for each vendor by tenant. Based on these services only a vendor can get the resources through REST API. RESTful web service check for authentication and authorization for every vendor request from any web portal or any other applications (using .net, java, android, IOS etc.).