Commerce projects are easier when everyone understands exactly what’s happening under the hood. That’s why Elastic Path is built on a foundation of the industry’s best open source projects, and open standards. We also provide exceptional documentation, in-house support, and source code if you need it — so you’re always empowered to meet the most demanding business requirements.
Spring Framework
The Spring Framework is part of the Commerce Engine architecture, and responsible for system-level services including object life cycle management, transactions, security, and job scheduling via the inclusion of several Spring modules. Spring's dependency injection and inversion of control allow non-invasive extension of Commerce Engine. This makes it possible to customize the implementation of classes without changing the code that invokes that class. The loose coupling offered by Spring provides a tremendous level of flexibility and simplicity for developers customizing Elastic Path.
Spring MVC
The Spring MVC (Model View Controller) is used to segregate all forms of presentation from the underlying business logic in Commerce Engine. Spring MVC makes every function highly configurable, and provides an elegant way to interface with popular viewer technologies including Velocity.
Spring Security
Spring Security provides comprehensive authentication and authorization capabilities in a mature and stable package designed specifically for enterprise applications built on Spring. Spring Security offers streamlined configuration and a modular architecture, with support for a wide range of standard authorization services.
Apache OpenJPA
Apache OpenJPA is a persistence layer that features lightweight and transparent persistence of Java entities and database independence. OpenJPA combines the best features from a variety of competing persistence options, including ORM, ODB, EJB2, and JDO — and includes a rich set of options for performance tuning, including a pluggable L2 cache and fetchplans.
Ehcache
Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache used by a wide array of business platforms to boost performance, offload the database, and provide scalability. Commerce Engine uses Ehcache for application-level caching of frequently requested objects such as products and dynamic content.
SOLR Enterprise Search Server
Apache Solr is an enterprise search platform based on the Apache Lucene project. Solr is extremely popular at leading technology companies and other large enterprises thanks to an outstanding track record of performance and reliability. It provides robust support for full-text search, faceted search, dynamic clustering, distributed search, and scaling. Solr is used to power many of the advanced search and merchandising capabilities in Commerce Engine, including guided navigation and filtered browsing.
Drools
Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) that uses a version of the Rete algorithm to implement conditions and execute their actions. Drools is used by the pricing and promotion features in Commerce Engine to determine which rules should be executed when, and to handle conflict resolution when multiple rules apply.
Eclipse Rich Client Platform
The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is the backbone of the Commerce Manager console, and combines the rich interface of a desktop application with the power of web connectivity. It also provides extensive customization capabilities via its plugin architecture, a consistent look and feel across platforms, and robust user interface libraries. Finally, as part of Eclipse — the most widely used Java environment — its powerful tools and broad acceptance empower developers to become productive quickly.
BIRT
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is a top-level project within Eclipse that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for Java applications. It is used by Commerce Engine to generate a wide range of analytics, including sales and marketing reports. The BIRT engine is also used for the creation of printable artifacts such as invoices and statements.
Maven
Maven is an Apache open-source project for managing software build processes. Maven encourages deployment consistency with a convention over configuration approach. This means that Commerce Engine developers are shielded from the complexities of the build process as much as possible, increasing efficiency and productivity.
OSGi
The Open Services Gateway is a modular framework that adds a complete, dynamic component model to the Java platform. This gives Elastic Path robust application lifecycle management, and allows selected services in Cortex and Commerce Engine to be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated, or uninstalled without requiring a reboot.
Next steps. The more you know, the more you’ll like.
Power it with Commerce Engine.
Provide advanced monetization capabilities to all of your digital experiences with the only commerce platform that drives over US$6.5 billion in revenue every year for our global customers.
Front it with Cortex.
Combine the power of Commerce Engine with other business platforms, and deliver their capabilities as a unified set of services with the world’s only commercial Level 3 REST API.
Talk to a technologist.
If you have technical questions about Elastic Path, we have the answers. And don’t worry — if you’re a fellow technology professional, we won’t hook you up with a salesperson.