Interchange

Interchange is an open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and application server/component applications such as IBM Websphere. Interchange is one of the most powerful tools available to automate and database-enable your web site or build online applications.

Interchange is far more than just another shopping cart program. It is a feature-rich development platform which permits development on a number of levels. In addition to this, it comes bundled with a high-specification shopping cart template (foundation) which can easily be customised to suite your needs, and an administration web interface for management of most aspects of your shopping cart or other web application.

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

ITL, UserTags and Perl

Interchange has its own markup syntax, Interchange Tag Language (ITL), and you can also create blocks of Perl, both in pages and in global UserTags. This means that it is easy to expand the core functionality of Interchange. All of our developers are proficient in ITL and Perl, and we have a great deal of experience in creating complicated UserTags for our projects.

Some of Interchange's many modules are transaction management, pricing, personalization, payment processing, reporting, customer service, and search.