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About Interchange

Interchange is an open source ecommerce system and application server/​component application, written in the Perl programming language. Interchange is a powerful tool to automate and database-​enable your web site. It is distributed under the GNU GPL version 2.

At its core, Interchange is a flexible and high-​performance web application server that handles state and session management, authentication, click trails, filtering, URL encoding, security policy, and much more.

Interchange is well suited for a variety of purposes, and has been set up to perform sales, order processing, content management, customer service, reporting and analysis, personalization, traditional retail sales, digital goods delivery, B2B parts re-ordering, auctions, order status checking, supply chain management, project management, online collaboration, and even an MP3 jukebox.

Interchange is geared towards security. With the thousands of Interchange applications out there, we know of no huge security incidents. Some notable features are protection against SQL injection and XSS (cross-​site scripting) vulnerabilities, configurable “secure” (HTTPS) pages, good credit card information handling policies, GnuPG/​PGP support, support for connecting to multiple databases from the same application, and system-​defined filters for user input validation.

Interchange can be used as a completely self-​contained standalone product, or as part of a larger system. It can be integrated with payment processing services, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, point-​of-​sale systems, accounting systems, external content management systems, other application servers, sales force automation systems, CRM (customer relationship management) systems, email campaign management systems, and remote databases on virtually any platform.

If you need functionality that Interchange doesn’t yet provide, you can incorporate it yourself in an extensible way that survives upgrades. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do so, there is a strong group of consultants present in the user community and available for complete commercial consultancy and support.

Thousands of people use Interchange and it has taken hundreds of millions of dollars worth of orders. But there is a definite learning curve required to customize Interchange. If you are looking to Interchange for e-commerce, and all you have to sell is a few simple items, it may well be overkill for your needs. If you, however, need a sophisticated ordering or content-​management system with unlimited room to grow, Interchange may be right for you.

Active Core Team Members

NameSinceTasks
Gert van der SpoelAug 2006Developer
Greg HansonSep 2004Developer
Jon JensenJun 2000Developer, release manager, sysadmin
Marco PessottoMay 2020Developer
Mark JohnsonFeb 2003Developer
Mike HeinsAug 1995Interchange creator
Peter AjamianAug 2006Developer
Peter MottramOct 2014Interchange 6 developer
Richard TempletOct 2014Developer
Ron PhippsFeb 2007Developer
Sam BatscheletOct 2014Developer
Stefan HornburgJun 1999Interchange team captain, Debian package maintainer, I18N

History of Interchange

See Interchange history to read the story of how we got here.

Site Areas

What Interchange users are saying:

2 years ago we needed an e-commerce application which could provide us a multi-lingual solution and flexibility to extend the site in the future with connections to our backoffice. Interchange showed to be the best for the job, and it has helped us become the leading resource for diecast models in Greece, while maintaining a competitive position worldwide.

Manos Papanikos, CEO at allcarmodels.com

See other endorsements of Interchange.