Stimulating interest in practical e-commerce programming using barcodes, Amazon web services, Java, and XML

Abstract

This paper takes the reader through the process of using barcodes in a practical setting involving ISBN lookup of book information using Amazon Web Services. Java and XML processing are used for the examples. While the implementation is fairly specific, the design is general and applicable to other contexts (e.g., ASP, PHP, .NET, etc.) and provides a way to make traditional programming assignments more interesting, valuable, and applicable from a student perspective. Each of the methods can be manually performed in the web browser to see both request and response before automating those actions in program code.

References

1. Feig, B. (2001). Low-cost web site promotion. Avon, MA: Adams Media.
2. International ISBN (2001). The International Standard Book Number System. Berlin: International ISBN Agency. Available at http://isbn-international.org
3. Snyder, R., HTML form automation and web page scraping using MSXML and ASP, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the International Business Schools Computing Association. Daytona Beach, FL, 2003.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document preparation

• Information systems

  • World Wide Web

    • Web applications

    • Web services

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing education

      • Computing education programs

        • Computer science education

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types