Interchange

Interchange is an open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and 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. 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 pages 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 classes 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, it is easy to incorporate it yourself in an extensible way that survives upgrades. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do so, there is a strong group of consultants who inhabit the the user mail list who can help you produce it.