Architecture

Extensible Design

From the ground up, we've thoughtfully designed customization and extension pathways into every one of our components - enabling developers to have the ultimate in control over how unique business needs are addressed in every Broadleaf Commerce implementation. Using standard Object Oriented Programming practices, developers enjoy complete control over behavior and configuration of all Broadleaf Commerce services and entities. Whether you need to add new properties to a product to support your individual business requirements, or override a feature in a service to provide custom behavior, Broadleaf Commerce has a well-defined and easy-to-use approach for you to achieve your unique goal.

Broadleaf Commerce is itself composed of a number of loosely coupled, enterprise-class services that work together to provide a complete eCommerce framework solution. Services may be called individually, or orchestrated together in workflows to achieve composite effects. Example, out-of-the-box workflows include checkout, payment and pricing - each of which may be modified or replaced, as needed.

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Best Of Breed Software

We utilize best-of-breed technologies known to developers worldwide as the core underpinnings of our architecture. Java is the programming language of choice among enterprise developers creating software for the web and is well-suited for even the most high demand sites. Spring is chosen daily by developers worldwide for the key features it provides, such as dependency injection, technology integration and transaction management - to name a few. JPA and Hibernate are well-known and highly utilized technologies in the area of data persistence and provide the object to relational mapping required to get your data from the customized object model inside the core Broadleaf Commerce engine into the database of your choice.

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Powerful Admin Platform

We know that requirements for your business users are just as unique as those of your customers. That's why we've baked the same degree of flexibility into our open admin platform. Based on the Google Web Toolkit technology and Spring, developers can define extension modules in their own Broadleaf Commerce implementation and utilize standard Java object oriented programming techniques to override and add functionality to the out-of-the-box administrative platform. This could be as simple as changing the name or ordering of a field in the user interface, or could be something more powerful such as adding a button that engages a custom integration with a backend system. The sky is the limit on what you can achieve! And since we've designed the Broadleaf Commerce Open Admin Platform to operate as a standalone component, you can utilize it for administrative tasks in other systems beyond Broadleaf Commerce alone.

The Broadleaf Commerce Open Admin Platform offers intelligence without developer intervention. Your entity extensions and additional fields are discovered by Broadleaf Commerce engine at runtime and are automatically reported to the admin. Intelligent defaults are chosen, but when more control is required, Broadleaf Commerce provides configuration options either through annotations or Spring xml configuration so that admin presentation aspects may be customized.

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Scalable Approach

The ability to scale to demand and maintain a positive user experience is paramount to growing an online business. Our software architecture and deployment best practices take this into account and help to guarantee that even during the busiest times, your Broadleaf Commerce site is able to maintain your target service level. The minds behind Broadleaf Commerce have an average of 18 years of experience in the creation of enterprise-class, highly-scalable and highly-available software systems for Fortune 500 companies. We've taken our experience and used it to create an eCommerce platform that runs efficiently on commodity hardware and can easily be scaled horizontally across multiple instances in a basic cluster.

Don't just take our word for it - our customers are saying great things about our scalability. The Container Store's legacy eCommerce system was subjected to extremely high loads during the times they were featured on the Oprah Winfrey show, often causing slow downs or outages for their online store. Here's what the CIO (Thomas Birmingham) of The Container Store had to say about their experience after implementing Broadleaf Commerce:

"Two weeks after we went live with Broadleaf [Commerce], we got the good news that we're going to be on Oprah again. Everybody's nervous - it's a new platform - and I looked at my watch and it's passed time. There was not a blip, at all."

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Multiple Database Support

Because of the flexibility afforded by Hibernate, we are able to support a variety of database platforms. We currently support HyperSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. So whether you are looking to use a free, open source RDBMS, or want to go with a commercial database platform, Broadleaf Commerce has the flexibility to work with your data storage tier.