Implementation of web product search engine (Part II)

• Main Author: Wong, Kuan Lung.
• Other Authors: Hoi Chu Hong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48490
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Online shopping is gaining more popularity among the community due to the advancement of network technology and the introduction of broadband network access. Recently, the number of e-Commerce transactions has been escalating as it gains recognition among consumers. Often, e-Commerce sites include functionality such as search engine and categorical browsing. This allows users to search for desired products through text format query or hyperlink click access. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement in technology probes the need for a more efficient and effective way for retrieving relevant products that users desire. This is because e-Commerce users often are intolerant to delays and slow response time. Therefore, slight degradation in performance may result in loss of interest from users in the business. Hence, it becomes a challenge for e-Commerce businesses to boost its application’s performance and reduce response time. This project focuses on various techniques to overcome the performance bottlenecks. It utilizes database load balancing and persistent database connection to distribute request load to the database server farms which leads to speed up in connection acquisition, lessening of result set retrieval time, and removes the possibility of single failure points. Database model such as Path Enumeration Model and Nested Set Model are adopted to provide similar hierarchical structure and boost records retrieval performance time. Other database modifications include storage engine migration and efficient query for pagination solution to further reduce delay in response time. Subsequently, the project’s system architecture was redesigned to reduce redundant message passing and to build a system consisting of better role-defined components. Besides, more object-oriented APIs with simpler interface such as JDOM are adopted into the project. Other implementations include source code and configuration files standardization to promote understandability and maintainability of the project. With these implementations, it builds a better foundation for future project development.