This guide from the Microsoft patterns & practices group, produced with the help of many people within the developer community, provides solutions for common problems encountered when developing cloud-hosted applications.
This book is about the techniques and systems used to allow payments to be made across the Internet. It is written primarily for researchers and industry professionals who need to develop a broad understanding of the important technologies in this area. Anyone involved in electronic commerce will ultimately need to understand how payment can be incor- porated into trading systems, and this book gives a comprehensive view of the best ways to achieve this today. It assumes that the reader has some knowledge of computers and networked systems, and the necessary cryptography required to understand the systems is fully explained in Chapter 3. Readers without a financial background will be introduced to thesalientaspectsofconventional(pre-Internet)systemsinChapter2asa background to Chapters 49, which cover each significant Internet-based payment category. The three authors of this book have been actively engaged in research into electronic payment systems since 1994. They are all mem- bers of the Networks & Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG) at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and in this context have been responsi- ble for developing innovative new designs and prototypes for new check, cash, and micropayment schemes. In 1996, as e-commerce was begin- ning to emerge as a major phenomenon, they saw a need for a book to give a good overview of the different types of payment systems that were offered. The book, Electronic Payment Systems, published in 1997, was very well received and, appropriately, won a best-seller award in its category from the on-line bookseller Amazon.com. Many things have changed since 1996, and this second edition of Electronic Payment Systems for E-Commerce has been greatly revised. New encryption techniques such as
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the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) have been covered as well as new coverage of elliptic curve cryptography. The main chapters have been updated to reflect the success or failure of systems that existed in 1996 and also any new significant systems that have been added. Perhaps the most significant change is a brand-new chapter on mobile payment for use in m-commerce. This is a commercially very hot topic at the time of writing and is likely to remain so in the medium-term future. As with the first edition, this book can only hope to capture a snap- shot of the technology as it progresses. Nevertheless, we believe that the core principles of payment exemplified by the systems in this book will be valid for many years to come.
