Customize WebSphere Commerce

We can extend the WebSphere Commerce product to fit your business needs. This topic describes the prerequisite skills and required knowledge that you need to customize business logic. After you have the required knowledge, use WebSphere Commerce Developer to take tutorials that guide you step-by-step through various customization scenarios.

What you need to know before you start

WebSphere Commerce is a Java and Java EE compliant application. To successfully customize WebSphere Commerce you need skills in the following areas:

• Basic Java and Java EE application development skills

• Basic JavaServer Pages (JSP) development and deployment skills

• Basic Java servlet development and deployment skills

• Basic JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) skills

• Basic HTML skills

• Basic SQL skills

• Basic XML skills

• Familiarity with developing and deploying Java servlets and JavaServer Pages in dynamic Web applications

• Basic understanding of Rational Application Developer

Before starting to customize WebSphere Commerce, read the following topics.

Required knowledge	See
Understand the main components and capabilities of the WebSphere Commerce development environment.	WebSphere Commerce development environment
Understand the WebSphere Commerce architecture including the information model, data model, and programming model.	Functional architecture
Understand how the WebSphere Commerce development environment interacts with the Web server, Database server and WebSphere Application Server.	WebSphere Commerce common architecture
Understand the major components of WebSphere Commerce and how they interact.	WebSphere Commerce framework overview
Understand how the data model, presentation information, and control information are separated into different objects.	Model-View-Controller design pattern
Understand the programming frameworks used by WebSphere Commerce and when to use each model.	Name-value pair command framework WebSphere Commerce BOD command framework
Understand the relationship of the business context service to business logic.	Business context service
Understand the main features of developing commands.	Command design pattern Command error handling

Best practices

• User interface extensions

  • Widgets extensions best practices

• Application tier extensions

  • Controller commands

  • Task commands

• API extensions best practices

  • SOI services

  • SOA services

  • REST services

• Integration

  • IBM Product Recommendations extensions

  • IBM Marketing Center integration

  • IBM Tealeaf

  • Facebook integration

• Extensions to messaging subsystem

• Component customization

  • Configurable properties of Management Center and SEO (Infrastructure component)

• Cache enablement for extensions store pages

• Search extensions

• Database extensions

  • model was designed for data integrity and optimal performance. WebSphere Commerce provides several hundred tables that store WebSphere Commerce instance data. To maintain data integrity, and to ease maintenance referential integrity, constraints are widely used in the database model. Indexes are used carefully on tables to avoid over-indexing and to provide a good balance between data retrieval and data manipulation activities (insert and update). The business rules are implemented at the application level rather than by using database trigger. Triggers, however, are used to facilitate data staging and optimistic locking. A limited number of SQL-based database stored procedures are used for data intensive activities.">Schema extensions

  • Data load for extended tables

  • Stageprop enablement for extended/custom tables

  • Access control