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CloudFree Commerce Platform

This project proposal is in the Proposal Phase and is posted here to solicit community feedback, additional project participation, and ways the project can be leveraged from the Eclipse membership-at-large. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.cloudfree newsgroup.

Background

E-commerce has become an integral part of today’s ecosystem and is material to many organizations businesses. It is one of the fastest growing sectors in the Internet. More and more organizations (manufacturers, retailers, education, travel and many others) are looking at e-commerce as a cost effective and reliable channel to sell goods and services to businesses and consumers. Unlike a few years ago, the e-commerce initiatives are no longer seen as side track or pilots. As the Internet usage grows exponentially with increasing bandwidths and more and more Internet enabled devices, the development of integrated, extendable e-commerce platforms is becoming critical to future growth for any organization. This includes not only traditional business, but also public organizations and governments, any educational organization, or even charity. Everywhere an Internet transaction is performed, it is safe to talk about "e-commerce" now.

While the past adoption of e-commerce was determined by the availability of "on-premise", proprietary software solutions developed by a handful software vendors, today’s vendor landscape looks different: It spans from low end, easy to deploy yet inflexible open source solutions to ISP based "SaaS" offerings. Which seems to be good a good fit for some user groups is certainly a thread for others who want to explore new business opportunities outside of their vendor's radar. Coming from such a background, we recognize the need for a dynamic, flexible and extensible platform which is capable of hosting e-commerce sites varying from a few to thousands of visitors and transactions per day. Flexibility and extensibility in today's e-commerce depends on a software vendor's roadmap, which is often determined by "the least common denominator" of potential users. Quick, unconditional provisioning of new features, feature updates or custom extensions - preferably with zero downtime - is hard to find.

Organizations who seek new, competitive e-commerce processes do experience that adopting e-commerce is not as easy as download, unzip and run. Besides sticking to the vendor's product strategy and having to pay extensive maintenance fees, many custom requirements can be integrated by finding a compromise between the software vendor's feature roadmap and their own requirements. Having said this, if organizations want to leverage the R&D efforts and development of current e-commerce vendors of any kind, they will certainly accept these compromises. But organizations who want to explore innovative e-commerce initiatives and at the same time rely on standardized components supported by a large user group will barely find a solution today. They have to develop for themselves a custom and proprietary solution which has high maintenance efforts and will be constrained by high ongoing development efforts.

While we have discussed the different user groups, also the bespoken software vendors are struggling with legacy platforms which are hard to maintain, extend and customize. Seeking a new technology platform to develop a product offering, whether it is SaaS or on-premise, is a gamble. What is the hottest technology today, can be outdated tomorrow. Technology platform vendors coming and going and what seems to be a wide choice is finally a selection between a couple of big software vendors with very high fees, slow feature adoption and no interest in e-commerce vendor specific needs. There is a development environment needed, which allows e-commerce software vendors to develop their own suites of products for their client base, combining it with other technology and providing the right "runtime" environment for custom development, high performance and scalability with low cost operations and maintenance.

The Equinox Runtime provides a highly dynamic environment for building component oriented applications. Equinox and CODA (Component Oriented Development and Assembly) is a proven component model which is also perfectly suited for building flexible, dynamic and extensible enterprise solutions. We therefore aim to bring this model into the e-commerce domain. E-commerce has been and still is one of the fastest growing sectors in the Internet.

Description

The CloudFree Commerce Platform is an open, dynamic and extensible platform for e-commerce solutions of all kind. By using Equinox and CODA we define a new platform that is designed from the beginning to gain leverage from the key advantages of Equinox and CODA - flexibility, extensibility and community.

CloudFree will support small, to medium, to large e-commerce sites by providing a scalable architecture. It will be useful for standard e-commerce shops to sell and merchandise goods as well as any public organization who wants to leverage the Internet as a communication and transaction channel, and for any organization who encourages their (potential) users to perform a transaction, whether this is an order, an application, online registration or content download provisioning. It will be accessible and easy to use for small organizations, large enterprises with multi-dimensional e-commerce initiatives or as a technology platform for software vendors. It will allow users to build and publish third party components which can be used and refined by all associated users.

No focus is set on a specific feature implementation technology. The CloudFree concept will be extensible and pluggable so that it can be exchanged and adapted from a standalone server deployment to a large-scale enterprise cluster consisting of many nodes spread across different locations. It grows with the user's needs and can be maintained by anyone who is familiar with the Eclipse environment. By that it gets the large support of the community to conquer the most complex e-commerce scenarios and use cases. Organizations who decide to develop their e-commerce processes in CloudFree will have the development standards of the Eclipse community, the ideas of many contributors and the reliability of proven e-commerce modules at hand.

The CloudFree Commerce Platform will develop infrastructure, components, and services that will support development, provisioning and operation of e-commerce solutions of all kind including content transactions. The essential functional elements of CloudFree 1.0 are well understood by domain experts. While there is significant engineering effort required, we feel that the work plan as proposed here can be implemented given sufficient and experienced resources, and does not involve an unrealistic level of technical risk. Consequently we propose this project be considered as an incubator within the Technology top-level project.

Project Principles

Among the key principles on which this project has been initiated, and will be run, are the following:

  • Leverage Eclipse Ecosystem - A major goal of this project is to apply the application development strengths of the Eclipse Project to the e-commerce domain. The project will work closely with other Eclipse project areas whenever possible to leverage the capabilities being developed in those areas.

  • Vendor Neutral - We aim to encourage Eclipse participation and drive Eclipse market acceptance by providing vendor-neutral capabilities and to encourage participation for complementary capabilities through additional projects.

  • Open, Standards-based Development - Where market adopted standards exist that meet the design goals, our aim is to leverage and adhere to them. Where market adopted standards do not exist, we will develop and publish any new capabilities in the Eclipse open forum.

  • Incremental Delivery - In order to meet the pent-up demand for a standardized platform for e-commerce solutions, we aim to deliver functionality to the market as rapidly as possible via an incremental delivery model.

  • Invite Users - During project execution we are going to work with potential user groups to understand the current needs even better and get guidelines for further priotization of work. The group will have its own schedule, but will actively seek for and involve potential users.

CloudFree Vision

The key vision on which this platform is based upon is:

  • No Clouds - It must be a pleasure to work with the platform, develop for and extend it, operate it and provide solutions on it.

Among the principles behind this vision are the following:

  • Development Modularity & Extensibility - Everything will be build as components, can be developed and deployed individually, by the community, project committers and partners.

  • Solution Flexibility - The platform, its components and services will be open to new markets, market changes and must adapt to business requirements.

  • Operational Simplicity - Easy provisioning into data centers combined with smart and simple, but not simplistic, administration and monitoring is a key element in making the platform operation a pleasure.

  • Cheap Scalability - It is important to grow with  clients and support a scalability model from the ground up.

  • Stackability - Platform, modules and components can be put together in packages by third parties to allow easy deployment and shipment - this saves time and effort.

Project Scope

The CloudFree Commerce Platform will develop infrastructure, components, services, and tools that will support development, provisioning and operation of e-commerce solutions or e-commerce development environments. Development of a fully-fledged e-commerce solution is out-of-scope of this project. Instead, we will focus on the runtime infrastructure and core components which are essential for building e-commerce solutions or e-commerce products. Additionally, exemplary services will be provided which demonstrate the extensibility and flexibility of the CloudFree Commerce Platform.

The CloudFree Commerce Platform Project will initially focus on the following components and exemplary services.

  • Inventory, Customer & Order Service - A set of "core" services typically required by e-commerce sites. These services will allow users to define, manage and retrieve products, customers and orders.
  • Exemplary Storefront Site - Typically, storefronts are tailored to merchant needs. They may be deeply integrated into portals and provide rich dynamic content. Therefore, only an exemplary storefront will be created which demonstrates the usage and integration with the services provided by the platform.
  • Contextual Runtime - This is a central model for establishing a "context" for building multi-tenant applications offered as SaaS. Typically, certain aspects in a SaaS system will not be static. For example, the availability of extension X of a service may depend on a service level agreement of the tenant using that service.
  • Clustering & Monitoring Service - With scalability and operational simplicity in mind, the clustering service will enable multiple installations to form an application cluster and provide operators with a management interface. Monitoring will be built into the platform as an essential concept and will also provide integration and extension points.
  • Admin Service - A central administration interface provided by the platform. The service will also provide extension points to allow extenders to integrate nicely with the platform.
  • Provisioning Tool - A utility for provisioning updates and new components across installations in a cluster in an automated and controlled way.

Outside the project's scope will be the development of vendor-specific integrations, such as integrations with specific ERP or CRM systems, as well as highly specialized services, such as a sophisticated product recommendation service. However, the CloudFree platform will provide frameworks and extension points to allow third parties building such integrations and specialized services.

Relationship with other Eclipse Projects

The CloudFree Commerce Platform project will be build on top of Equinox. Eclipse projects which provide useful required technologies and functionalities, including Riena, EclipseLink, and ECF, are candidates that the CloudFree Commerce Platform codebase might depend upon.

Organization

We propose this project should be undertaken as a Technology project. Being a Technology project gives it room to experiment without disruption to other Eclipse Platform development work. Finally, since Technology sub-projects are not meant to be ongoing, we foresee three possible evolutionary paths for the subproject:

  1. The project is moved to a permanent state as a Runtime project.
  2. The project is moved to a permanent state under a new "SaaS" top-level project.
  3. The technology proves to be insufficient for Eclipse and the work is set aside.

These paths are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of some or all of these paths may be the result of the work done in this project.

Interested Parties

AGETO Service GmbH, as the submitter of this proposal, welcomes interested parties to post to the eclipse.cloudfree newsgroup and ask to be added to the list as interested parties or to suggest changes to this document.

Initial Committers

  • Gunnar Wagenknecht, Project Lead (AGETO Service GmbH)
  • Ronny Schmidt, Committer (AGETO Service GmbH)
  • Ralph Spickermann, Committer (AGETO Service GmbH)
  • Frank Rub, Committer (igniti GmbH)
  • Christian Günzl, Committer (igniti GmbH)

Interested Companies

  • AGETO Service GmbH, Jena (Germany)
  • igniti GmbH, Jena (Germany)
  • TowerByte e.G., Jena (Germany)
  • PlanetEye Inc., Toronto (Canada)
  • Weigle Wilczek GmbH, Esslingen (Germany)

Code Contributions

Gunnar Wagenknecht is offering a CloudFree prototype as an initial codebase. The prototype is built with proposed concepts in mind and will be used as a potential codebase.

Tentative Plan

Development is ongoing and a first demonstrable showcase is planned for November 2008. This prototype will demonstrate key concepts such as extensibility and provisioning. It will be used to socialize community feedback and to make a decision on the ongoing development. In case of significant community interest the development continues following an Eclipse iterative development approach with version 1.0 scheduled for Q4/2009.

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