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Take a look at http://www.konakart.com/product/technical-details .

The AppEng does invoke the Eng to get his work done. You will be customizing the Eng API calls. As long as the API calls keep on returning ProductIf objects the AppEng will continue working as is.  You customization code should just fill in the attributes of the Product objects from your external sources. You should customize all API calls that return Products.

Not everyone uses the AppEng since it is quite specific to a certain type of eCommerce application. For example, many customers that integrate KK into CMS applications, make calls directly to the engine.

Yes, the custom engine is a good way of adding functionality since the API calls tend to be very stable between releases so you should have no problems upgrading.

I look forward to reading about your results.

A lot depends on how your store front application works and the user experience you want to give to your customers. i.e. If you want to allow them to search for products, sort them by various attributes, use product tags to categorize them etc. then we need the data within our database in order to be able to query it.

Another problem that often comes up with just storing a reference, is performance, so you have to be careful to store enough descriptive data in the KK database in order to be able to display a list of products, and only look up from the legacy database if a customer asks for more details.

If you were to take the reference approach, I think that a good way of doing it would be to use our custom engine and to customize the getProduct* API calls to fill the product objects with external data before returning them to the client engine .

I recommend building a small utility using the KK admin APIs that synchronizes the KK database with the legacy databases at regular intervals or whenever the legacy data changes. In this way you'll have all of the data within KK and will be able to use all of the available product search and sort functionality. i.e. If you use the enterprise version of KK you'll be able to take advantage of the SOLR search engine and the suggested search functionality.

You have to design your own widgets to capture the information.

You put the text in custom basket fields when the product is added to the basket. When an order is created, these custom fields will be copied to the OrderProduct custom fields so every line item of the order can have its own custom values.

In the admin app under Modules >> Order Totals, try moving the order of the Tax module below the discount module.

Take a look at Eway_auAction.java which calls the postData() method. The list contains the parameters that get sent to the payment gateway. These are created bythe Eway payment module on the server.

I'm building a wicket front end for konakart

Great. As far as I'm aware http://www.savvyshop.nl/home is also a KK / Wicket store.

You have the source code for BaseGatewayAction, so what I suggest is that you copy the postData() method from that class into your framework and just debug it through.

Most users of KonaKart upload images using tools like FTP, and have a naming convention such as SKU_1.jpg, SKU_2.jpg etc. so that the store front can dynamically pick up the images based on this known naming convention.

In our demo store front we use a widget which requires four large and four small images and we've created a naming convention for that widget.

I suppose the bottom line is that you can do as you please. You could have up to 4 hard coded image names in the image attributes of the product or you can create a naming convention for whatever image widget you decide to use in your store-front application.   

In our next general release (mid-summer), the integration with TaxCloud will be much tighter, in the form of a TaxCloud module that you can install and uninstall using the admin app.

I'm not a Liferay expert I'm afraid, but I was assuming that since you have access to the Liferay Jars there could be a way of calling into Liferay.

Take a look at the OrderIntegrationManager http://www.konakart.com/docs/OrderStatusChangeActions.html . Here you can add your own code to communicate with Liferay when the state of an order changes or an order is saved. Maybe you can call Liferay APIs directly from here since KonaKart is running in the same WebApp as Liferay?

The store-front application you download with KonaKart is a JSP / Struts / Tiles application. In order to change a page you have to edit the JSP for that page.

Before doing anything, I advise that you educate yourself on these technologies.

Rather than the "Product Discount" promotion you should use the "Order Total Discount" promotion if you want a discount off the total price of an order.