Conference · 2005
Building an e-Business Platform: An Experience report
Stephanos Androutsellis-Theotokis, Vassilios Karakoidas, Georgios Gousios, Diomidis Spinellis, Yannis Charalabidis
An experience report from building the PRAXIS server and clients: what it took to make independent business systems exchange documents asynchronously over web services and XML, and what the integration and testing phases taught.
- Published in
- Proceedings of the eChallenges 2005, 2005
- Citations
- 11 on Google Scholar, read 5 September 2026 — 16 of 30 by count
- Cite as
- TKGSC05
The idea
Business-to-consumer commerce took the industry years and a crash to get right. Application-to-application interconnection is harder: proprietary accounting, ordering and supply-chain systems have to exchange data reliably, securely and in an open standard way, or every business relationship needs its own bespoke bridge. PRAXIS was built to let a typical small or medium enterprise carry out a significant part of its transactions over the internet, with government systems included in the picture.
What the report covers
- An architecture built entirely on the emerging technologies of the moment — web services and XML — with independent clients operating asynchronously against a central server that orchestrates and controls the workflow.
- A business document exchange protocol developed from the ground up, because the specific needs of business-to-government transactions in the Greek market were not met by what existed.
- The methodologies and tools used for the server and for its clients, and the experience gained through design, preliminary integration and testing.
Where it sits
One of four papers on the PRAXIS project on this site, alongside the eChallenges paper, the MDA paper and the EURO-XX presentation. It also exists as a book chapter.
Written from the paper itself — the PDF linked above, which this site hosts.