Abstract
E-commerce is getting widely used in many developed countries, but it is still not common in the Middle East especially Palestine due to the lack of infra-structure and small businesses can’t afford their Own Web Store. This project aims to find a solution for small and medium scale businesses and allow them to have their own easy configured web Store with low cost and no maintenance. As Cloud Computing and SaaS is the new trend in software engineering, Pal-Store was built to provide software as a service to customers using Multi-tenant Architecture, where the E-commerce core is built once for all tenants but every tenant has his own database. As the customer sign up he configures his store categories, options, detailed properties for each category, and the products. Then store owner can manage his products and monitor transactions easily through the admin panel provided as part of the software.
The E-commerce core is built using Spring MVC framework which is a J2EE framework for web. The database is MySQL configured with Hibernate which is an Object Relational Mapping framework that maps the tables in the database to a classes in Java. On the client side we used HTML5 + CSS3 and bootstrap framework for responsive design approach to support wide range of devices (PCS, Tablets and Smartphones).
The Pal-Store project is the solution for small and medium scaled businesses who can’t afford the expenses of building a complete web store and doesn’t have professionals in web technologies. Our Software allows these businesses to have their own easy managed and secure store for a low subscribing price.