[ic] Interchange, RedHat & the future

Mike Heins interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Fri Sep 27 17:50:01 2002


Quoting Miles Clark (mmc@tolosatech.com):
> Hi All -
> 
> I'm new to Interchange, and am evaluating it as a commerce platform for 
> my company.  I had a few general questions that I'd through out to the 
> list & see if anyone had any input.
> 
> * How scalable is Interchange?  Has it been used in production with 
> 20,000 - 30,000 products?  How'd it perform?

I've seen up to a million. Obviously you need to make allowances
for searches and selects, but there is no limit beyond what your
database and skill can do. No software can repeal the laws of
physics.

Many of the techniques used in foundation are not suitable for
larger product sets, but you can change them or disable them
to avoid problems.

> * How customizable/extendable is Interchange?  How difficult is it to 
> add new ITL tags?  Create a library of templates that customers can 
> select from?  Add new payment processors?  Integrate with other web 
> services (particularly J2EE services)?

Bearing in mind I am prejudiced as one of the major authors, I would say
it is unmatched for extensibility. As for ease of adding tags, you
create a file, restart, and there it is. In fact, every IC tag in 4.9
(which I recommend all new developement use) is a UserTag. They are
fully as powerful, nay indistinguishable, from the intrinsic tags.

Adding new payment processors is a breeze within the limits of their
API. There are quite a few templates to work from.

As for integrating with J2EE, I don't know enough about it to say.
It *should* be as easy as with anything, but it is not Java of course.
I really know nothing about it.

> 
> * What are Interchange's weak spots?  
> 

Ease of use is probably the biggest. It is a complex beast, and
you have to make an investment of time (and if you are a serious
outfit, money) to get it going.

Scaling to very large traffic sizes is not very well lined out. If
you have a million page views a day, you need to put as much effort
into IC as with any dynamic site. But it is possible.

It uses a fair amount of resources, but since we don't represent it
as something to run on your $10 per month hosting account, I don't think
that matters much.

> What I'm looking for is a little advocacy.  So far, I've been really 
> impressed, but would like to know what issues I'm likely to run into 
> should we commit to the product.
> 
> One other question - as I was scanning the lists, I noticed that RedHat 
> disbanded it's ecommerce division (& active support of Interchange) this 
> last summer.  Why?  Were there issues with Interchange specifically? 

No. It was a decision to eliminate divisions that Red Hat did not feel
were at the core of their business. I believe they made the right decision,
myself, trying to be objective.

> Did they find a replacement they liked better?

They decided Ars Digita was a better *content management* solution, which
it may be. Time will tell. 

As far as ecommerce goes, no.

> General business climate?  

That made a difference to *everyone*. As of July 2000, the big ecommerce
deals stopped and everyone retrenched.

As far as committment, you should know that all of the core developers
of Interchange who were working on it a year ago are still with it
today. Actually, from a code and development perspective, the impact of
the parting with Red Hat has been positive. I think I can say I am the
biggest contributor, and I have had my hands untied and am doing a lot
of work taking IC to the next level. Time again will tell, but I believe
in 5 months IC 5.0 will hit and we will be the best advanced ecommerce
platform out there.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike@perusion.com>

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find I have just
lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as
well. -- Diane Ackerman