What is e-commerce? This free course, An introduction to e-commerce and distributed applications, will look at typical application areas including the internet, supply chain management and online auctions. It will also help you to understand the underlying technologies used to implement e-commerce applications before looking at some of the problems that can be encountered when developing distributed e-commerce systems.

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• detail what is meant by the term ‘e-commerce’
• examine some typical distributed applications
• detail some of the problems that are encountered when developing distributed applications
• describe briefly some of the technologies that are used to support distributed applications
• show how some of the technologies detailed in the course are used in concert to realise a typical commercial system.