A: The Broadleaf Commerce Community Edition is distributed under the Broadleaf Fair Use License. The Enterprise Edition is distributed under the Broadleaf End User License Agreement and associated Support Terms Agreement
[Back to Top]A: Both. Broadleaf Commerce, at its core, is an eCommerce development framework. It is a set of Java libraries, dependencies, and default configuration files that can be embedded into an application such as a web application or a batch process. As a framework, Broadleaf provides a mechanism to extend, override, and customize any part of the core functionality without changing the code. However, Broadleaf Commerce also provides a pair of applications collectively called The Heat Clinic. These applications include a functional, customer facing demo site and an administrative console. As an application, The Heat Clinic can be used as a starting point for any new Broadleaf Commerce implementation. The Heat Clinic is easily customized, allowing you to control and override the UI, business logic, and any custom data that you require.
[Back to Top]A: Broadleaf Commerce is generally application server agnostic. Broadleaf requires a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. Broadleaf has also been tested with Jetty, JBoss Application Server, Oracle WebLogic Application Server, and IBM WebSphere Application Server. You may also run certain non-web components of Broadleaf outside of a Servlet container (e.g. a batch process).
[Back to Top]A: Broadleaf Commerce is database agnostic. You can use any relational database that Hibernate supports. We have done the majority of our testing with MySQL 5.1, Oracle 9i and 10g, and HSQLDB.
[Back to Top]A: Not currently. Broadleaf depends heavily on JPA and Hibernate. As Hibernate advances to allow JPA mappings for NoSQL databases, we will begin to invest effort in this area.
[Back to Top]A: Yes. We have deployed Broadleaf Commerce to Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, CloudBees, CloudFoundry, Hiroku, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
[Back to Top]A: Broadleaf has a large suite of default functionality built in, so it's possible that you will only need to customize the UI and some configuration files. But Broadleaf can be extended and customized in almost any conceivable way. Broadleaf provides over 4000 Java classes that represent business services, data access objects, entities, and utilities. If your requirements are more complicated, you can also extend entities and implement business services and data access interfaces to customize Broadleaf's default behavior. More information can be found in the extending entities tutorial or in the extending services tutorial.
[Back to Top]A: No. Broadleaf has been designed to allow you inject your own custom data, business logic, UI, and integration points without changing Broadleaf's core code.
[Back to Top]A: No. Although we chose to implement the DemoSite application using Thymeleaf, you are free to choose any view technology you would like to use. In fact, the only change you will need to make aside from creating your views is the necessary XML to register a different templating engine with Spring.
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