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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): 4.9.6
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
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.
www.icdevgroup.org
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