Dasher: a prototype for federated e-commerce services

The Dasher project (Defense Acquisition System for High performance Services) focuses on the procurement subset of e-commerce. It aims to provide a common service infrastructure that supports distributed applications and federations of loosely affiliated software components. The Dasher effort leverages a long standing electronic procurement application called FAST (A.-L. Neches, 1993), which has evolved during continuous operation since 1987. The FAST implementation intertwines multiple procurement services, which are controlled asynchronously during operation. Dasher modularizes and restructures FAST to investigate a federated systems approach.