Integration
KonaKart is designed with integration in mind so it has a wide range of features that make this easy to achieve.
Most businesses will have a number of different systems that are essential to their operations. More often than not these systems will work best if they can communicate with one another without human interactions.
For example, you may wish to take your orders in KonaKart using the web-based store front but then move these orders directly to your warehouse or shipping system for further processing.
All KonaKart functionality is available through APIs (Java, SOAP, JSON or RMI) which can be used by other systems to communicate with KonaKart. We’ve seen that this approach can be used successfully for the front end, to integrate with portals and content management systems, as well as the back end to integrate with ERP and Order Management Systems. KonaKart has been integrated successfully with front end systems such as Liferay, dotCMS, OpenCMS, Magnolia CMS, DAY CQ, Yanel CMS and 3Spices CMS.
Industry Standard Integration
One popular interfacing technique that external systems can use to communicate with KonaKart is using KonaKart’s “SOAP web services”. This allows systems written in just about any technology (on any platform) to communicate with KonaKart using industry standard programming techniques.
The SOAP web service interfaces could be used, for example, to update your products offered for sale by KonaKart from another system that holds stock information. Another use could be to send orders to KonaKart from other systems, perhaps in a B2B environment.
The APIs are also offered using Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). RMI allows distributed Java to Java communication where the sender and receiver may be on different virtual machines. JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format popular for writing mobile applications. The JSON APIs are only available for the Application Engine and not for the Administration Engine.
Some integrations are provided “out-of-the-box” such as the integration with Google Base – which allows you to publish your products in Google, and the integration with Open CMS – a popular open source content management system.
JavaScript jQuery eCommerce Store-Front Integration
All of the KonaKart store-front APIs are available in a JavaScript library which allows integration of eCommerce functionality into any browser based application. The APIs use asynchronous AJAX technology in order to provide an elegant and smooth customer experience. Find out more from the download page.
MQ Integration
To support the guaranteed delivery of messages to external systems the Apache ActiveMQ java message queue has been integrated (Enterprise Extensions only). A typical example of where this might be useful is where you wish to transfer orders to another system via a message queue once your orders have reached a certain status (eg. once payment has been received). According to their web site, Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source messaging and Integration Patterns provider. ActiveMQ fully supports JMS 1.1 with support for transient, persistent, transactional and XA messaging.
Designed for Integration – from the very beginning
There are many examples of how KonaKart can co-operate with other systems in your IT architecture. We expect customers to need to integrate their eCommerce system with their other systems in flexible ways, so KonaKart has been carefully designed from the very beginning to make this easy to achieve.