Broadleaf Commerce

Tools and Frameworks Developers Love To Use

Broadleaf Commerce was developed, from the ground up, with developers in mind. It is an enterprise class, open source eCommerce framework written in Java. It was built on leading open source technology frameworks, including The Spring Framework, Hibernate, Thymeleaf, Smart GWT to name a few. It was designed for easy extensibility and customization with a pluggable, interface-based design and a unique application context merge process.

Here's how it works... (show more)

Broadleaf Commerce provides Java libraries (jars) with default components and configurations. The default components include data entities that map to database tables, services containing business logic such as pricing, data access objects with default queries and persistence logic, and UI controllers. Broadleaf also provides a starter application in the form of a Maven archetype. You can use Broadleaf Commerce, out of the box with no additional configuration. However, many organizations will want to, at least, customize the UI. Many other organizations will want to extend or customize the default behavior of Broadleaf Commerce according to their specific requirements.

The framework is designed to allow you to extend any Broadleaf entity, add your own custom entities, and replace or extend any service, DAO, or controller. You can do all of this without changing the core Broadleaf libraries or source! How is this possible? Broadleaf Commerce provides a unique application context merge process that allows you to override any default configurations or components and to extend or add new data entities. This merge process takes your custom configurations and merges them with Broadleaf's default configurations, overriding Broadleaf's default behavior where appropriate. As long as you implement the appropriate interface(s) and use the same Spring Bean names, Broadleaf will happily use your custom implementation(s) in place of its own default logic.

Broadleaf Commerce also provides a workflow paradigm for complex activities such as add to cart, pricing, and checkout. This allows you to insert custom activities into these workflows. These activities could include decrementing inventory in an external system, notifying a warehouse, sending an email, or any other custom activity that is required by your business.

Broadleaf Commerce can also run on almost any application server or servlet container including Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere. Broadleaf Commerce provides rich functionality out of the box. It also provides you complete control over what you customize and how you deploy it, with tools, like The Spring Framework, that developers prefer to use.