Project Summary
eCatalog is yet another catalog management system. We started creating eCatalog because we wanted a flexible system that allowed us to build functionality as needed and did not lock us into some vendors self-centered view of doing things (application servers, development tools, APIs, etc). This open design will enable companies the ability to efficiently distribute catalog information to several client platforms (Internet, CD-ROM, PDA, etc).

Design Goals:

• Design a database structure to store catalog data in a non-proprietary relational database management systems (MS Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) so that applications could easily be written using standard development tools.
• Design an open XML format to publish catalogs so that information could be shared easily among external systems that did not have access to the database.
• Create applications to create and modify catalogs in the database.
• Create applications to view and order from catalogs published in XML format.