OBJECT ORIENTED FRAMEWORK MECHANISM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING A GENERIC ORDER ENTRY PROCESSING INTERFACE FOR ONE OR MORE ORDER FULFILLMENT SYSTEMS

An object oriented framework defines a generic order processing interface that creates an order, and that processes the order and generates requests to one or more fulfillment systems to fill the order. The generic order suitably includes one or more line items. One or more extensible interface classes are provided in the framework, which allows a user to define the order entry protocol for the relevant order fulfillment systems. Once properly extended, the framework is used to generate an executable framework application, which allows a client to enter a generic order, and which then generates the appropriate requests to fill the order with the appropriate order fulfillment system or systems. The framework of the preferred embodiments thus allows the specific knowledge of the back-end order fulfillment systems to be isolated to the extended portions of the framework, while the front-end order entry system has no knowledge of the order fulfillment systems that may be called upon to fill an order. The framework of the present invention thus allows adding a new order fulfillment system by simply extending the framework to define the attributes of the new fulfillment system without making changes to the core portion of the framework that governs how generic orders are processed.