From the project proposal... on my todo list to re-write:

For the past several years many steps have been made towards extending the internet to the average user. Social networking, photo/video websites, blogs, and more all give that average user the power to create content online. As per the first lecture of class eCommerce makes up .23% of retail sales in the United States and has maintained an annual growth rate of approximately 25% over the past 5 years. This project is an attempt to extend the web to small businesses by providing them with a system to promote and sell goods.

This system will be built using JSP, Servlets, Javascript, and a MySQL database. The fundamental data objects will be: Business, Item, Page, and a host of elements that will be placed on each Page (e.g. Text, Image, Link...). There will be two types of users: Customers who use the website to browse business and thus do not need access rights and Business owners who will have registered accounts in the database. Business users will have access to secure areas such as page building/editing using session login variables as authentication. Their passwords will be encrypted in the database. After logging in Businesses will be able to save/update information about them, but most importantly create Pages and Items.

Pages: Creating a new page will present the Business user with a blank page. Businesses will customize this page by setting CSS style attributes as well as creating and dragging the aforementioned Item, Text, Image, and Link objects around. Users will be able to set CSS attributes appropriate to each of those objects via a collapsable "attributes..." tab. This positioning and style changes will be accomplished through Javascript and CSS, usually allowing the user to visualize the changes without having to post the changes and reload the page. Once the user is satisfied with his/her creation a POST will save the state of the page.

Items: Items will simply be a pre-constructed grouping of the more primitive objects accompanied with an input field and "add to cart" button. Business users will be able to clearly describe the Item/Product/Service through Text, Image, and Link objects and then be able to drag this item onto any of their pages as it may be useful to appear more than once throughout their site.

Finally, all of these creations will be available to the public in a non-editable form. Visitors will never have to register or login to take full advantage of the site. The homepage of will allow visitors to search through businesses by type and location and link to their respective URLs. The URL of each business will simply be ~/BusinessName. While shopping Visitors will be able to add items from multiple Businesses to their cart and check out in one location. The checkout process will result in an email invoice of oder and billing information to each of the businesses.