About Interchange
Interchange
is the open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and
"best of breed" application server/component applications. Interchange is one
of the most powerful tools available to automate and database-enable your web
site or build online applications. It's also one of the easiest tools to
learn, plus it's open source, making it the most open and least expensive
solution to implement.
If you've been thinking of using tools from BEA, IBM, Microsoft, BroadVision,
Intershop, Blue Martini, Open Market, Mercantec, Allaire, or Interworld to
build your web site or online application, you'll be making a serious mistake
if you fail to evaluate Interchange before you make your decision. If you've
been thinking of building a system by hand in Java, Perl, ASP, PHP, Cold
Fusion, or any other environment, you should consider the time savings that
building on the Interchange platform may bring you.
Interchange is well suited for a variety of purposes, including: sales, order
processing, content management, customer service, reporting and analysis, and
personalization. Interchange has been implemented for traditional retail
sales, digital goods delivery, B2B parts re-ordering, non-commerce content
management, auctions, order status checking, supply chain management, project
management, online collaboration, and even an MP3 Jukebox. Interchange can be
used as a completely self-contained standalone product or as part of a larger
system. It can be integrated with payment processing services, ERP systems,
point-of-sale systems, accounting systems, external content management systems,
Java-based application servers, sales force automation systems, customer
relationship management systems, email campaign management systems, and remote
databases on virtually any platform.
At its core, Interchange is a flexible, high performance application server
that handles state management, authentication, session maintenance, click
trails, filtering, URL encodings, security policy. It's made up of the
following components:
- database abstraction layer
- generic templating system
- transaction routing rules
- customer information object
- universal localization scheme
- security blackout definition
- profiles
- filters
- search language
- session management
Some of Interchange's many modules are transaction management, pricing,
personalization, payment processing, reporting, customer service, and search.
Interchange templates are simply HTML page with specialized
Interchange-specific markup tags called ITL (Interchange Tag Language). ITL
allows for a highly customizable combination of components to be displayed on
the page, both static and dynamic. There are several types of ITL tags,
including:
- built-in tags - A library of pre-built tags that enable Interchange functionality
- user tags - custom designed tags that can be created for any purpose
- localization - tags that allow multi-language or multi-locale implementation
- "Perl" and "ASP" tags - allow the insertion of Perl or ASP code into templates
If you need functionality that Interchange doesn't yet provide, build it
yourself or have Perusion do it for you. If you develop new functionality
yourself you'll then have the option of either expanding and supporting that
functionality through subsequent versions of Interchange, or you can submit
that work to the Interchange project and the community will keep it up-to-date
and maybe even expand it.
|
