Demandware Architecture

SaaS platform (软件即服务 平台)

The term SaaS (Software as a Service) is used to define the method of delivering software to a customer. Software and applications are hosted on the internet and delivered to customers who pay for access. Software updates are performed on the hosted platform without customer intervention required.

 

Point of Delivery  (交换点)

A Point Of Delivery or POD refers to the Demandware hardware deployed in a data center. A POD contains multiple state-of-the-art（尖端）application servers, database servers and the clustering(聚合) and backup infrastructure (基础构架) to support multiple client Realms.

 

Realm

Each Demandware customer is allocated(分配) one or more Realms. A Realm is a collection of resources (资源集合) which are used for developing, testing, and hosting one or more Demandware eCommerce sites.

 

Instance

A single running Demandware server, hosted in the Demandware hardware infrastructure.

 

Primary Instance Group

Every Realm includes a Primary Instance Group (PIG) which includes three Demandware instances:

1.  Production – the production environment, or also known as ‘live’ instance, is used as the actual eCommerce storefront.

2.  Staging – the staging instance is used for uploading code and preparing it for testing in the Development instance.

3.  Development – can be used to test processes without impacting (影响) the production storefront (i.e. Product import feed).

 

Secondary Instance Group

Every Realm includes a Secondary Instance Group (SIG) which includes 5 Demandware Sandboxes. Sandboxes are used by developers to develop and test their code. They are not as powerful as PIG instances in performance, memory and storage.

 

Business Manager Overview

Business Manager is the user interface used by both merchants

and developers for managing administrative tasks within their organizations. Every Demandware instance has a Business Manager portal (入口) for each organization.

For instance, a marketer would log into the Business Manager portal in the Staging instance, Sites organization to manage the live site or sites for a company.

 

Merchandisers use Business Manager to control:

 Products & Catalogs

 Content

 marketing campaigns

 Search settings

 Customers

 Site Analytics

 Site URL’s

 Site Preferences

 

Developers use Business Manager to manage:

 Code & Data Replication

 Code Versioning 代码版本控制

 Site Development

 Data Import/Export

 Global Preferences for all sites /organization 全局参数配置

 

An Empty Site

When you first log into your Business Manager portal for the Sites organization, you will have no storefront to manage. By default, the Sites organization is deployed with no sites. You must either create a new empty site (which will have no data) or create a copy of SiteGenesis (discussed in the next chapter) and import it into your Sites organization.

 

SiteGenesis Foundation Architecture (基础结构)

Demandware provides a sample site, called SiteGenesis, which you can use as the basis of your own custom sites. SiteGenesis is a resource for both developers and merchants. For developers, it provides sample code — pipelines, scripts, and

ISML templates — which you can inspect (查阅) to see current best practice. For merchants, it provides sample configurations for catalogs, categories, products, and so on. In short, SiteGenesis is a full featured demonstration (范例) eCommerce site, which you can use to explore the Demandware platform and its capabilities (功能).

In order to get the latest version of SiteGenesis the read-only SiteGenesis package needs to be imported as a sample site in every Sandbox instance.

 

Caution (警告) !

Never import SiteGenesis into an instance in your Primary Instance Group (PIG). You can easily import SiteGenesis into each instance in your SIG.

However, if you import SiteGenesis into a sandbox that contains other customized sites, you may overwrite existing attributes and lose data, so you should not import SiteGenesis in this case.

It is safe to import SiteGenesis into an empty sandbox. If you also want to import custom sites into the empty sandbox, make sure you import SiteGenesis first before importing the custom sites. By importing SiteGenesis first, you ensure that custom attributes for your custom sites are retained (保留) if there are conflicts, as your custom attributes will overwrite the imported SiteGenesis custom attributes. If this occurs, the SiteGenesis site might not function properly, but your custom attribute data is kept intact (完好无损). After importing SiteGenesis, you can validate its behavior by comparing it to the site running on the dedicated instance (专用实例).

 

Site Configuration

After you have imported the SiteGenesis site, you will need to disable site caching in order to see your code changes immediately in the site. This is something that developers do in their sandboxes to avoid having the page cache take effect and prevent pages from displaying differently after they have made code changes. In production instances the cache is on by default.

You will also need to index the site in order to be able to search for products from the storefront.

Sharing Data between Sites

The SiteGenesis import contains data specific to that site, SiteGenesis but some data is also shared among all sites in the organization: the SiteGenesis catalogs are available to the empty site you created earlier (之前). The sharing of catalogs allows for master catalogs containing all products to be shared at the organization level, and for specific site catalogs to contain categories and products to control navigation for each site.

Site catalogs can have different categories and products assigned to those categories.

In short, while master catalogs define all shared products for an organization, a site catalog provides the specific category navigation and products for a site.

Therefore, a site must have only one site catalog, but may have one or many master catalogs.

Even when a master catalog is shared between two sites, there are site-specific attributes such as OnlineFlag that allow for one product to be online in one site, but offline on another site, To achieve this, the product must be assigned to one site catalog and its OnlineFlag turned on, while on the second site catalog the same assigned product will have the OnlineFlag turned off.

 

在多个Sites之间共享数据

导入特定于该网站的数据, 但是一些数据也在组织内的所有sites共享: SiteGenesis的目录可以在你之前建立的空site内使用。目录的共享允许master目录包含所有可以在组织级别共享的商品。而且 site目录包含分类和商品控制导航对每一个site。Site目录可以有不同的分类，不同的商品分配到那些目录中。总之，master目录对于组织定义所有可以共享的商品一个site目录提供指定分类导航和商品对一个site。因此，一个site必须只有一个site目录，但是可以有一个或者多个主目录。一个主目录被两个sites共享，有 site-specific属性，例如 OnlineFlag 允许一个商品被开启于一个，但是在另一个site关闭。为了达到这个目的，商品必须被分配到一个site目录，而且它的OnlineFlag 打开。当第二个site目录也被赋予这个商品，OnlineFlag将被设成关闭