  Among the existing E-Commerce applications, online auctions are the most
influential ones. Their impact on trading in the B2B (business to business) as
well as in the B2C (business to consumer) and C2C (consumer to consumer) areas
will be inevitable. This article describes the architecture of a web-based
realtime online auction system, together with the functional and technical
requirements that evolved during the development process and heavily influenced
the architecture. From the point of view of this real world case study, ways to
minimize the development time and yet ensure a robust and flexible system are
explained: combining standard software and self- developed components, reusing
code wherever possible, and employing the eXtreme Programming approach and its
test concepts.
