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At the beginning, the Internet was only applied in the area of academy. In 1995, business went into the Internet domain and has gradually become one type of the most essential Internet applications. In 1997, the quantity of business activities on the Internet is up to 15% of that of the total business activities.

At present, we can find all kinds of business activity forms including advertising, ordering goods, inviting business tenders and electronic trade on the Internet. Even shops have emerged there recently. Shops on the Internet is referred to as virtual shops for they don't occupy any physical space.

Virtual shops also allow for interaction between the customers and the proprietor. But this interaction is through computers hooked onto the Internet. A customer who visits a virtual shop can browse all goods, choose those he want and put into the shopping cart (a virtual cart), and finally pay and exit. Of course these occur in a virtual environment, and after that, the proprietor must ship the real goods (not virtual goods) to the customer.

The following section discusses mechanism and implementation of a virtual shop using WWW. This shop is a virtual software supermarket. We assume shops of computer products will be one type of the most popular virtual shops on the Internet because the Internet is a computer network. (The other most popular virtual shops may be book stores, flower shops, and etc.) Section 3 concludes the paper.

2 Mechanism and implementation of the virtual shop  

The architecture of virtual shops is of client/server model. Two servers are laid on the core of the server end: one is a WWW server, which is responsible for orginizing service programs in HTML and Java and responding to users' service request; the other is an SQL server which is responsible for goods data management. The WWW server communicates with the SQL server and provides service to the users (customers).

In the client end (i.e. customer end), the customers run Internet browsers (ex. Netscape, Mosaic, Microsoft IE) as client programs to submit their service request such as goods browsing, goods choosing and etc. If the request is accepted by the WWW server, it will transfer some HTML files that may be Java embedded to the customers. These HTML files actually contain the information the customers require. Furthermore, the information transferred is hypertext information that the customers can get other information from it.

A virtual shop is consisted of multiple web pages. We conceive that, for a virtual software supermarket, the first page should be the homepage of the supermarket, the next pages referred to as goods pages exhibit software that allow customers to choose, and probably there is a “last page” which says “Thanks for your visit, Good bye” to the customers.

Since the supermarket is a prototype, not an actual shop, it can have no virtual counter for the time being. This is to say, in this prototype shop, the customers can take any software without paying. (Of course, they will never get the real software through this prototype shop.)

According to this scheme, we implemented a virtual software supermarket which is consisted of a homepage, many goods pages and a “Good bye” page. In addition, we developed a goods database using SQL. This database is retrieved by the goods pages.

The homepage presents the service aim of the supermarket. The goods pages are a collections of software goods. Each item represents a software product, and it has an icon and a concise description of this product. Some of the items contain a link pointing to another page--its own homepage. On this homepage, a description in detail is given. Furthermore, some characteristics (ex. interface) of the software at running time are also given. From this page, the customers can know much more about the software.

On each goods page, there is a shopping cart icon. One can drags a software icon into or out of this cart icon. That means one put a software product into or out of the shopping cart. The cart icon can be open to show what products are there.

All pages described above are developed in HTML and embedded Java. HTML adopts tags to achieve diverse effect including text, table, hypertext link and etc. And Java can implement image, sound and animation. There are two types of Java programs: Java applications and Java applets. Java applets can be embedded in HTML programs to enhance web pages. Hence HTML with Java applets is used to implement the virtual software supermarket. Java provides an SQL database access interface Java database connectivity (JDBC), and it is used to develop the module of data retrieval in the software products database.

The virtual software supermarket can be considered as a usual web location. Its development is much like that of other web locations. Of course it should be more vivid in order to attract more people to visit and to choose software products. We don't yet explore how to ship the real goods to the customers after virtual shopping. This issue can be addressed with the merchants in the future.