Palm Based Shopping System
Business Requirement
A leading online grocery store wanted to enable its customers to purchase groceries using palm devices. According to the client “This palm based shopping system would enable a large group of our customers who own palm devices but do not have Wireless Internet access, to buy groceries using their palm devices.” Apart from the requirement that Calsoft Labs solution should work perfectly with their existing website, the client also needed a solution that would not call for any alteration to existing business layer. Due to limited memory availability on palm devices, the palm based shopping system had to be lesser than 50k in size.
Solution
During the preliminary requirement phase, Calsoft Labs ascertained that apart from building an application that runs on palm device, there has to be a component capable of communication between the palm device and the existing web-store. Data like user’s list of favorite items, latest price list and on sale items has to be transferred from web-store to the palm device while contents of shopping cart and order history has to be transferred from web-store to the palm device.
Calsoft Labs designed the solution to be a three layered approach illustrated in the diagram. Apart from meeting all the requirements, the solution designed, requires no additional efforts from user in order to facilitate synchronization of data between web-store and palm device.
The three distinct layers designed are
- Palm application that interacts with user through easy-to-use wizards to ensure that user has a pleasant shopping experience. User can select items from his favorite list, on-sale list, previously ordered item list or from store catalog.
- PC layer in form of a conduit, which transfers data to and from web-store, during hot-sync operation.
- Non-interactive ASP pages, which communicates with both conduit and existing business layer to “checkout” user’s purchases and to update user’s favorite list of items.
Technology
A number of different tools and technologies were used for building this solution including Palm SDK, Conduit Development Kit (CDK), Active Server Pages and Code-warrior for Palm.