openCPQ - A Browser-Based Product-Configuration Framework

With openCPQ you can implement product configurators that run completely in the browser. The traditional approach is to run a configuration engine in a server and to use the browser only for displaying the user interface. The browser-based approach has advantages for several stakeholders:

• End users need not wait for round-trips to the server after each input, which allows them to work more smoothly. End users can even run the configurator while disconnected from the internet. (This is possible due to HTML5's Offline Application Caching feature.)
• IT operations need not worry about scalability of a configuration server since they only need to host static web pages.
• System integrators implementing a customer-specific user interface can easily access the configuration data locally without the complexity of requests for remote data.

Product models are written as JavaScript programs using functions and classes from the openCPQ library. Compared with the traditional approach of representing models as data structures in the configuration engine's database this provides the following advantages to modellers and IT operations:

• Models are text files. So they can be read and modified with text editors, some of which even provide special support for JavaScript.
• Furthermore textual models can be managed in state-of-the art version-control systems such as Git or Subversion. A version-control system providing HTTP access to its documents (with configurable access rights for different kinds of users) can even be used directly to host models and other resources for the end users.
• If modelers find themselves doing repetitive work such as implementing similar features for several products or components, they can use JavaScript functions and classes to define higher-level customer-specific concepts on top of the openCPQ API. This can make models much easier to maintain.
• Since openCPQ is a quite thin layer on top of standard web technology, it is easy to learn for anyone with a little JavaScript web programming background.

Finally, since openCPQ is an open-source project published under the liberal MIT license,

• there are no license fees to pay and
• you can even adapt openCPQ itself to your needs if the need should arise.

Nevertheless, professional support is available.