Microsoft .NET Proje Yarışması 2003 İkincilik Ödülü: İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi

Proje Bilgileri
Project Name :	Mobile Store
Project Team :	Zülküf Genç - Hüseyin Hasçelik
Project Scope and Description :	Mobile Store is basically an e-commerce system that is designed for a virtual city named as Mobile City. Aim of this project is offering a new approach to classical e-commerce systems and providing a model to introduce this approach. Although mobile store project was developed for a virtual city to demonstrate a model, it is quite simple adapting the project to real world. The only thing that should be done to adapt the project to real world is adding map and suppliers information of a region into project database and announcing the project to public. The mobile store project consists of customers, carriers (transporters), stores, store managers, executive software and system administrator as major objects. -Customers can give order and view their order status using Internet Web Browsers or Mobile Phones. -Carriers take order information from executive software with their Mobile Phones, buy products in customer shopping-list from member stores and transport these products to customers. In addition, carriers are responsible for updating the order status and road status using their mobile phones. There are currently four carriers in the system but system administrator can add easily more carriers to the system. -Stores are the suppliers of the system. Any store that accepts the membership agreement can take part in the system. -Store Managers add/remove product, update the product information and announce the campaigns using Internet Web Browsers. -Executive software adds customers to the system, takes orders from customers, determines the carrier, route of carrier and stores where products will be bought, and informs the carrier about new order updating the carrier WAP page. -System administrator adds stores, carriers and roads to the system, removes customers from the system. Customer orders, carrier positions, map information, points of suppliers and status of goods in suppliers are required input objects for the system. After system receives a customer order via WAP or HTTP, it determines the carrier who enables the shopping in shortest time. Then, it determines the route of the carrier and stores placed in this route according to customer desires. Finally, the information comprised what carrier should do is sent to carrier chosen. This informing process is the main data object produced by the system as output.
Project Innovation & Creativity :	Mobile Store project is a unique project in Turkey and currently it is not known whether there is a similar example in the world. Mobile store project offers a new way to classical e-commerce systems. The current e-commerce systems attempt to include goods in their bodies and to employ exterior shipping companies to deliver goods. This situation causes an important limitation in range and amount of goods obtainable from e-shops. Also, since classical systems use third-party shipping companies, occurring of shipping-time problems is inevitable. However, mobile store does not attempt to include products. It attempts to include retailers and to deliver goods using its own shipping system. Thus, mobile store offers shopping without any limitation in range and amount of goods along with shortest shipping method. Mobile Store project enables the inhabitants of a region to do shopping without any variety restriction. That is, customers have the capability of buying everything that is sold in the stores. Furthermore, they do shopping using their mobile phones as well as using their web browsers thus a mobile phone having WAP property becomes enough tool for shopping. In addition, mobile store project offers the quickest shipping method in the present systems due to the fact that carriers are assigned to pre-determined regions that allows the carriers to reach the suppliers in the shortest time. Also, the system presents three shipping options to the customers. In the first option, customers determine the suppliers (store names) manually and software sends the route that enables the carriers to do shopping from stores preferred by customers and to arrive at customer address in the shortest time. In the second option, customers choose “ shortest time “ then software determine the suppliers reducing the shopping time and the route taking shortest time automatically. In this case, the time becomes the most important factor and stores are selected according to route. In the third option, customers choose “ cheapest form “ then software determines the suppliers that provide most economic prices for the products in shopping-list and generates the appropriate route. In this case, cost becomes most important factor and route is determined according to stores. Finally, since mobile store communicates via WAP with carriers, an additional GPS informing system and a wireless system are not necessary to make a communication between the carriers and the system. As the carriers move, they inform the system about their current locations and traffic status of the roads so the system has the latest information about the region traffic. That means, our customers can use the system additionally as a city-traffic-info stuff that can be reached from mobile phones or web browsers and supported by another .NET web service.
Social Responsibility or Commercial Viability of the Project Idea :	If we compare the mobile store project with classical e-commerce systems, we notice that mobile store has significant advantages. Firstly, a large amount of capital is crucial requirement to put a classical e-commerce project into practice because this kind of systems have to start to serve without any deficiency in number and variety of goods. Otherwise, the first impression on customers never becomes positive and it is almost impossible to gain the interest of a customer who had a negative feeling about your site later. However, the only thing to put the mobile store project into practice is to rent a small number of carriers for a few months and for a well-determined region plus to announce the existence of the project to inhabitants of region. If the project fails the things that are lost are not so much compared to the things that are lost when a traditional e-commerce project fails. But, if project becomes successful you can enlarge the system adding more regions, more carriers along with more stores into system and making more profitable agreements with suppliers. . Finally, the failing possibility of the project is very low if it is designed and planned well since it brings the quickest shipping method (at most a few hours), unrestricted product variety compared to real world, the shopping change with use of mobile phones as well as PCs and same prices with the stores if customers do shopping over a pre-determined limit. (Otherwise, they pay a little amount of shipping money)
Advantages of Web Services model and .NET for the Project :	As the purpose of web services, using web services makes the project data public (but only for authorized users). We use same web service method for MobileStore WEB Application, MobileStore WAP Application and also the new existing application "No-Traffic WEB Aplication". Since the data transform is done with XML which is the defacto standard for data interoperability and there are explanations for all methods by WSDL, the Project Data (Market statistics, customer statistics, City traffic status statistics, Carrirer statistics and other application statistics) can be served to any other application by just authorizing it to get the data. Another advantage of using web services for our project and also for every other projects is "no physical distribution of the software" . So this will cause less cost and easier maintenance. On the other hand, .NET provided us a great development medium. We had the chance to developed a fully object oriented web application and to use numerous classes which decrease the development time and increase development output. We also utilized many advantages of the Visual Studio .NET.
Project Plan :
If any; describe algorithms used, ECMA standards used,control development and any difficulties during the project application development:	We have used the shortest path algorithm and its derivatives in our project in methods which finds the suitable route, store or carriers… We have used 3-layered structure to increase the software maintenance and independence. We have used object oriented features of .NET like custom web components, user controls and inheritance. We have had some difficulties about web services security (web services authorization) as we could not find a strong solution about this issue.
Technologies Used:	ADO .NET, ASP .NET, Mobile Internet Toolkit, .NET Web Services
Programming Languages:	Visual Basic.NET
.NET Enterprise Servers:	Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Internet Information Server.
Platforms:	All platforms which is supported by .NET Framework
Standards:	Beside SOAP and XML, we use some custom coding standards and project folder management standards. We use 3-layered structure as a development standard.
Mobile Extensions:	Mobile Internet Toolkit
Project Resources and References:	· Building XML Web Services for the Microsoft .NET Platform - Microsoft · ASP.NET Unleashed - SAMS · ASP.NET Professional - WROX · MSDN · http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/daab-rm.asp (Data Access Application Block) · Writing Secure Code - Michael Howard and David LeBlanc
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