WebSphere Commerce 6.0 - What’s New?
Now that WebSphere Commerce 6.0 is out, let us take a quick look at what it has to offer to the business process, developers and adminstrators.
At the high level it is a complete revamp over its prior version. There are changes almost at every conceivable level. There are new “separately orderable features” such as IBM Sales Center and IBM Gift Center. Order processing capabilities now include several features that left many wondering how we lived without these features in the past! Most retailers added these features by customizing the heck out of the commerce versions they were using. Multi-tender, multiple ship dates and support for non-taxable items - some of the desparately sought after features - are finally available out of box. If you ever wondered whether Payments Cassettes is easy to use - you will find the answer in this: WebSphere Commerce now provides support for Payment Cassettes for backward compatibility! The new rule for payments is lightweight plug-in architecture. The big deals for stage propagation are the concepts of workspaces and quick and global publishing options.
Now that the core feature list is dumbed down to one paragraph, let us shift gears and focus on what matters the most for the developers.
Struts - The New MVC.
Proprietary model-view-controller is out and Struts is in. WebSphere Commerce FrameWork pages on the infocenter provide a good introducttion on how struts is used as the new MVC. The migration path even provides for a task which helps in converting urlreg and viewreg entries to Struts Actions and Forwards. Thus for obvious reasons ViewReg table is removed from 6.0 Version. When you look at the Database Schema Changes from 5.6 to 6.0 - you can’t help notice that a number of new tables were added while just two table were removed. However a number of tables were also deprecated.
New WebServices Framework
This version promises a new web services framework that allows commerce to be both a service provider and service consumer. I think this is significant for retailers who work with external systems for tax, inventory and fulfilment services - assuming the external systems provide for web service interfaces.This is also important for retailers who allow external systems to place orders on behalf of the retailer.
Good Bye WSAD
RAD is now the new IDE. WSAD will no longer be used to develop WCS applications. Cloudscape is still supported. There is just one integrated test environment instead of lightweight and full test environments that were available in WCS 5.6 toolkit. Setdbtype.bat can still be used to switch databases - but will now provide more descriptive messages. The setup of the developer automatically runs createdb.bat script. Anyone putting together their own development environment should be aware of this.
This note focused on only a few of the updates in the new version. We will dig deeper into these new features in the coming days.