ApacheCon US 2008 Session

Intuitive interfaces for complex e-commerce (Web 2.0 UIs for dynamic products with complex sub-assemblies)

A lot of e-commerce systems will let you "put the item in the basket" but OFBiz takes things to a whole new level. A single product may drive thousands of top level SKUs that feed into hundreds of thousands of sub-assembly configurations. Prices can be based on a complex bill of materials plan, feed stock costs and service hour rates. This has huge potential for users. Instead of wading through pages of SKU and option codes the user can "click and drag" their way to a finished order. For the developer, however, presenting these options and managing the user experience is a daunting task. In this talk we will cover the powerful product configuration capabilities in the OFBiz e-commerce infrastructure and demonstrate strategies for feeding those options into intuitive interfaces. A familiarity with OFBiz product entities and a tolerance for Google Web Toolkit based RPC is strongly recommended. Aspirin provided.