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.