Automating the process from E-Commerce to M-Commerce

The boom in the usage of smartphones has led to the increasing demand of mobile compatible websites. M-site is the term associated with a website that is meant for mobile device. Since the characteristics of websites and m-sites are different, most mobile sites are built from scratch. Since there are some common features and technologies for developing website and mobile site, a tool (Automated Mobile Site Creator) is being proposed as a solution and it will automatically produce an M-commerce site given an E-Commerce website. After analysing the structure websites on the Web, it can be concluded that 90% of them are developed using 5 main parts which involve HTML (Web information and Structure), CSS (Presentation), JavaScript (Validation), Picture Compression and PHP (Database Interaction). A 5-Step Approach is used in by the automated tool: (1) the entire HTML tags are converted to XHTML, (2) The CSS files become different WCSS files, (3) High resolution pictures are compressed into adapted resolution, (4) JavaScript and PHP are both converted as Mobile Ajax codes and (5) for the Database, an Interface is created to allow aggregation of the data stored into a universal model that suits the template of our tool. These are the five important parts that will build up the m-commerce site. The Automated M-Commerce Site Creator converts a whole site by following all links from the homepage. As such the conversion process is a bit time consuming, however once implemented the loading time of m-commerce site compared to the e-commerce website in a mobile phone is approximately 2 times quicker on average.