BEA released AquaLogic Commerce Services this year to help BEA customers with their commerce initatives. ALCS is a product that offers a storefront and comprehensive merchandising capabilities out of the box. If you need to build a commerce solution for your business, ALCS makes it quick and easy. This blog entry describes a supplemental distribution that allows BEA Workshop developers to get up and running easily on ALCS.
NOTE: this blog entry was originally posted October 18th, 2007 on my previous blogging system (dev2dev.bea.com).
NOTE: as of 2009, the ALCS product has been discontinued.
AquaLogic Commerce Services
This blog entry will not focus on the ALCS product itself, but if you have not seen it here is a quick overview. It is a full solution for developing commerce projects for the enterprise. ALCS provides a fully customizable commerce solution that offers many features for both developers and merchandisers.
Features at a Glance
- Complete storefront delivered in the box - a powerful web shopping experience
- Merchant Tools - catalog management, promotion management, analytics
- CSR Tools - order management, fulfillment
- SEO - world class SEO capabilities to drive customers to your door step
- Ajax one page checkout - fast track your customers through the checkout process
- Developer friendly - productive development experience based on Velocity and Spring MVC technologies
- Extensibility - highly customizable and extensible architecture offers complete control over the solution
- SOA foundation - features exposed via web services, and integrated into the BEA SOA story
- Scalability - built on enterprise Java technology, ALCS can scale to meet the demands of the largest commerce projects
For more detailed information on the features in the product, please check out the product information page.
Introducing ALCS 5.1 for WLW 9.2
One of the benefits of ALCS for BEA customers is that it deploys to WebLogic Server and integrates with WebLogic Portal. It fits in with the products that you already know and love. This makes deployment consistent with other projects you have deployed on the WebLogic stack.
However, for the ALCS 5.1 release the development environment out of the box is not aligned with the BEA Workshop IDE. This will get sorted out for the next release of ALCS. Until then, I have created a supplemental solution for ALCS 5.1 that allows for easy integration with BEA Workshop 9.2.
Called ALCS 5.1 for WLW 9.2, the supplemental download has the following features:
- Script target to reprovision the ALCS sample application into the Workshop project structure (aka WTP)
- Script target to reskin the sample store from "Snap it Up" to "Avitek Digital" (credit to Dan Tortorici!)
- Script target to add in prominent disclaimer/promotion announcements to the store
The download available on dev2dev CodeShare includes ample instructions and a presentation that provides more context.
Additional Resources
To get started with ALCS, also consult the following documentation:
- ALCS Product Documentation: top level link to the ALCS technical documentation
- Developers Guide: a comprehensive developers guide
- ACLS 5.1 Download: link to download a free evaluation of ALCS
- ALCS Marketing Center: materials to help convince your boss to use ALCS
- Wendy Bales' blog: great thoughts from the ALCS product manager
