About 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.
NOTE: This site runs on Interchange, typically the latest
development release. Current running version (from [version] tag):
5.0.0
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.
Caveat: Interchange is not presented as being easy to use,
easy to install, or bug-free.
Thousands of people use Interchange, and it has taken hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of orders in its time. But there is a
definite learning curve required to use Interchange. If you are
looking to Interchange for e-commerce, and all you have to sell is a
few items, it may well be overkill for your needs. But if you need a
sophisticated ordering or content-management system with unlimited
room to grow, Interchange may be right for you.
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