Introduction

BroadleafCommerce is an open-source, e-commerce framework written entirely in Java on top of the Spring framework. It is targeted at facilitating the development of enterprise-class, commerce-driven sites by providing a robust data model, services and specialized tooling that take care of most of the "heavy lifting" work. To accomplish this goal, we have developed our platform based on the key feature sets required by world-class online retailers - and we're committed to continually expanding our feature offering. We've also taken extra steps to guarantee interoperability with today's enterprise by utilizing standards wherever possible and incorporating best-of-breed, open-source software libraries from the community.

Getting Started

Check out our Getting Started guide to quickly kick off your Broadleaf-enabled website.

Support

Broadleaf commerce offers commercial support and training which can also include professional services. Community support is offered through the Broadleaf forums and/or our GitHub issues.

Key Features and Technologies

Spring Framework

Spring is the enterprise Java platform on which BroadleafCommerce is based. It provides numerous features, including dependency injection and transaction control.

Security

Spring Security provides a robust security framework for controlling authentication and authorization at both the code and page level and is utilized by BroadleafCommerce for access control.

Persistence

JPA and Hibernate represent the BroadleafCommerce ORM infrastructure for
controlling persistence of our rich domain model.

Search

Flexible domain search capabilities in BroadleafCommerce are provided through integration
with Solr.

Task Scheduling

Scheduling of repetitive tasks in BroadleafCommerce is offered through the
Quartz job scheduling system.

Email

Email support is provided throughout the BroadleafCommerce framework in either synchronous
or asynchronous (JMS) modes. Email presentation customization is achieved via Thymeleaf templates.

Modular Design

Important e-commerce touchpoints are embodied in the concept of BroadleafCommerce
"Modules". A module can provide interaction with a credit card processor, or even a shipping provider.
Any number of custom modules may be developed and utilized with BroadleafCommerce.

Configurable Workflows

Key areas in the e-commerce lifecycle are represented as configurable
workflows. Implementors have full control over the keys steps in pricing and checkout, allowing
manipulation of module ordering, overriding existing module behavior and custom module execution.
Composite workflows are also supported to achieve more exotic, nested behavior.

Extendible Design

BroadleafCommerce is designed from the ground-up with extensibility in mind.
Almost every aspect of BroadleafCommerce can be overridden, added to or otherwise modified to enhance
or change the default behavior to best fit your needs. This includes all of our services, data access
objects and entities. Please refer to the extensibility section of our documentation.

Configuration Merging

As an extra bonus to our extensibility model, we offer a custom merge facility
for Spring configuration files. We minimize the BroadleafCommerce configuration semantics that an
implementer must be aware of, allowing our users to focus on their own configuration particulars.
BroadleafCommerce will intelligently merge its own configuration information with that provided by
the implementer at runtime.

Presentation Layer Support

BroadleafCommerce also includes a number of pre-written Spring MVC
controllers that help to speed development of the presentation layer of your own BroadleafCommerce-driven
site.

QOS

BroadleafCommerce also provides quality of service monitoring for modules (both custom and
default modules) and provides support for several QOS handlers out-of-the-box: logging and email.
Additional, custom QOS handlers may be added through our open API.

Promotion System

BroadleafCommerce includes a highly-configurable system for including your pricing
promotions. We provide several standard levels at which promotions may be applied: Order level, Order
Item level and Fulfillment Group level. In addition, your promotion business rules are represented in
a flexible and standardized way using the MVEL expression language.

PCI Considerations

We have taken measures in the construction and design of BroadleafCommerce to
help you achieve PCI compliance, should you decide to store and use sensitive customer financial
account information. Payment account information is referenced separately, allowing you to segregate
confidential data onto a separate, secure database platform. API methods have been added to allow
inclusion of any PCI compliant encryption scheme. Also, verbose logging is included to track payment
interaction history.

Admin Platform

BroadleafCommerce includes a wholely extendible administrative application built with Spring MVC. The admin application also provides an easy-to-use interface
for catalog, order and customer functions and provides a robust, rule-driven environment for creating
and managing discount promotions.

Admin Customization

BroadleafCommerce provides a robust set of admin presentation annotations that allow configuration of domain
class display and persistence semantics without touching any admin code. This provides an easy-to-consume approach
for introducing entity extensions and additional fields into the admin forms so that your business users can immediately
start to benefit. We also provide a full annotation or xml-based approach for overriding the admin config declared
inside BroadleafCommerce so that you can have an impact on our defaults. And for more advanced customizations, our admin
platform is based on Spring MVC, so your Spring knowledge will translate here as well when it comes to adding additional
controllers, and the like.

Content Management

BroadleafCommerce includes a robust content management system for creating and
managing static pages and content. We also include a powerful content targeting feature that allows
business users to dynamically drive the most appropriate content to users.

Local Framework Development

Broadleaf Commerce recommends JDK 1.7, but will build/run with JDK 1.6 or 1.7. At this time Broadleaf has not been tested with Java 8.

Most developers won't need to modify the framework code and instead should rely on the Getting Started guide to quickly kick off your Broadleaf-enabled website.

If you do want to fix a bug or contribute to Broadleaf, see our CONTRIBUTING.md guidelines.

The easiest way to make changes to the core framework (again not typical) is to clone this repository and execute a clean install via Maven:

mvn clean install

If you are using JRebel for development, add the Maven profile 'blc-development' to include the necessary rebel.xml files in the built jars:

mvn clean install -Pblc-development

Our integration tests take a while to execute so you might also want to temporarily skip tests:

mvn clean install -Pblc-development -DskipTests

Note: all contributed code must have passing tests via Maven

If you need to use a specific version of Broadleaf, simply check out that version using either the branch or tag. All releases are tagged 'broadleaf-<version>' whereas all active development versions are tagged 'BroadleafCommerce-<major.minor>.x'. For instance, if you would like to actively develop on the Broadleaf 3.0 line in order for your changes to be in the next GA patch release of Broadleaf 3.0, you would check out the 'BroadleafCommerce-3.0.x' branch.</major.minor></version>

git clone git@github.com:BroadleafCommerce/BroadleafCommerce
cd BroadleafCommerce

# use 3.0.x-SNAPSHOT
git checkout BroadleafCommerce-3.0.x
mvn clean install -Pblc-development

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Broadleaf Commerce core is released under the terms of the Apache Software License 2 (see license.txt). However, various commercial modules that are also available (for instance, price list management) are released under a different commercial license. These are not included with the core Broadleaf framework.

We also offer various levels of enterprise support licenses. Please contact us for information.