Architecture for a component-based, plug-in micro-payment system

Micro-payment systems have the potential to provide non-intrusive, high-volume and low-cost pay-as-you-use services for a wide variety of web-based applications. However, adding micro-payment support to web-sites is usually time-consuming and intrusive, both to the web site's software architecture and its user interface implementation. We describe a plug-in, component model for adding micro-payment support to web applications. We use J2EE software components to encapsulate micro-payment E-coin debiting and redemption and discrete user interface enhancement. A CORBA infrastructure is used to inter-connect J2EE and non-J2EE vendors and micro-payment brokers. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with an on-line, pay-as-you-use journal portal example and outline an approach to using web services to further generalize our architecture.