As e-commerce becomes more pervasive, enterprises are eager to move their business processes on to the Web. At the same time, business process management is being called on to continuously reevaluate and reorganize applications into new sets of components that are integrated into new processes. Web sites, in short, are turning into e-malls, offering a range of products and services [1].

This interesting paper describes an architecture involving an interactive multimedia banner that lets users browse through, and buy merchandise from, an e-mall. A browsing agent enables interactive browsing within the banner. A transaction agent facilitates secure transactions through strategic interactions with different e-commerce servers and e-malls.

The system architecture employs the IBM HotMedia ToolKit to manage the presentation of multimedia banners with 3D objects, and to help users interact with banner content. Middleware agents act as liaisons between the interactive browsers and the various e-commerce servers.

Grammatical flaws and incomplete sentences mar the presentation of the paper somewhat: “The browsing agent and transaction agent is described ...” (p. 55); “Such that, the data structure in the browsing agent can be quite different from that of a conventional commerce server’s database.” (p. 62).