Morpheus Blog

If there is one thing you want when running a Commerce site it is a good search.  People need to be able to easily find the products they need, and perhaps even up sell some things to them within the search.  You also want to make sure that the search has a minimal amount of impact on the rest of the site.  If you have tens of thousands of products you don't really want to have heavy searches going on across lots of attributes.  Unfortunately if you use the Commerce search functionality it is heavy and it is quite basic, because at the end of the day its just SQL matches over the top of your data.

What you instead what is a way to rate the products and the matches found.  So perhaps looking for "Harry" has a better match in the title of the product if its a book rather than the author or description.  or maybe you want to match on common endings so I search for "roast" on a cookery site I may want roasting, roasted and roaster to come back as matches.  Now you could invest in a product like Omnifind, but that does incur a cost and although it can do a lot for you an alternative free option may be to use Lucene.  

This is an Open Source offering that can help move your search away from the database, and provide some really great functionality.  Instead of looking at the data in the database Lucene builds indexes which you define across the data and then uses those indexes to search against.  These can then either be held in memory or on disk depending on the resources available to your environment, and suddenly any searches are removed from being a Commerce overhead.  The product provides all kinds of functionality for doing weighting of results and uses a stemming algorithm to provide words matches for you.  The results returned from Lucene are then used to get the products data so things such as stock status can be shown, so we are mixing the two technologies together.

You can see this in action at both the TBP and Jeroboams sites, where searches are driven from Lucene.  Try some different terms and you can see it is also possible to highlight your results.  You could then take this a stage further and also have a weighting against your products if you wanted to move them up or down in the search results.

If there is one thing that is both a good point and a bad point about technology, then it is the pace that things move at.  It is great that don't have to wait years for a new version a  new release a big change, it keeps things interesting.  But at the same time it is bad, because those changes and releases make it very difficult for documentation, tutorials and  training courses to  be relevant and better yet available.

Sometimes it feels like you are indeed the mouse on the mouse wheel running around trying to keep up, but then also looking for those instructions that actually help you build mouse wheel 4.9.2.3.4. Is it actually something that is worth doing?  That is the question that on some days does come up.  Should we attempt to use these things because they are there, or do we let someone else take them on?  But if we let someone else do them, then is it perhaps the case that we all sit there and want someone else to do them.  Which then means that nobody ends up using them!

Yes new things are indeed great but we rely on outside companies not changing their mind between feature packs x and y as to the way things were done, and also that there is enough to get us going.  And when we are stuck because things do not make sense we need someone to answer the question.  We want the latest but is it always possible to deal with the pain, but if no one deals with the pain the issues in the latest never come to light.  The company doing the producing thinks all is great, because hey no complaints and so continues on with what they are doing.  While the people out there dare not use it because will it change, and can I make it work in the first place.

The Rational EGL team have released a tech preview of the Rich Web Support that will hopefully be included in the product later this year. Its good to see this kind of thing being shown early so that as users we can get as much feedback into the offering as possible.

If you have not got into services before then it might be a little bit daunting, as this is a rough version of what is promised. But we need to start somewhere and better it is out and available than not there at all. The download also includes a demo on how things can work.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/reglrws?open&S_TACT=106AH21W&S_CMP=AWLP

Morpheus have just completed the work on two new V6 Commerce sites

http://www.jeroboams.co.uk

http://www.milroys.co.uk

They utilise some of the new Web 2.0 functionality within Commerce such as the fast finder page for categories. The sites feature some excellent wine and whisky choices or even whiskey depending on where it comes from.

The third release of IBM's Portal 6.1 Beta is now available.  A few issues on OS400 but they are getting fixed quickly, CD is the man.

Visit

https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/lotus/wps61beta/

The documentation is available here

http://infocenters.lotus.com/help4/index.jsp

If you want some very useful instructions for integrating a better Rich Text Editor with IBM's Web Content Management product visit here.

The article takes you through the steps needed with Portal 6, so you can use a proper RTE.

IBM has announced a promotion on WebSphere Commerce Professional and Enterprise that halves the entitled price paid by customers making their first purchase of the software.

To qualify, you will need to have less than 1,000 employees and complete the transaction by 31^st March 2008.

The offer is limited to licences for either one or two processor cores.

Ivor

In June 2005 the website for The Book People was relaunched using WebSphere Commerce 5.6. Now in February 2008 a full rebranding has taken place of the site, which introduces many new features and taken more advantage of WebSphere Commerce 6, which the site has run on since April 2007  The aim of these changes is to make it easier for people to find what they want, using a search mechanism built on Lucene rather than SQL against the database. Personalisation will then be introduced using the new functionality in feature pack 3, that can help target content for the user and increase the conversion ratio on the site.  Aspects such as the checkout process have also been simplified using service calls to combine multiple pages together, such as the shipping which now shows delivery addresses and charges calculated on a single page.

Is it time to get with the program and get off the green screen for your development? Or at least it time to seriously consider why you should stay there? You may not have noticed but the Rational brand now owns the tools for the I and the days of everything being bundled have gone, which should at least make it much easier to understand what you have and use the right pieces. The tools also take you through the whole spectrum of options of what to do with that boring machine sitting in the corner (ha). Do you want to enhance your skills use your PC and build RPG applicatuions, CL then RDI is what you want.. Or maybe you want to take your application forward expising it to the browser or producing web services, which can be consumed by other applications then HATS for 5250 aplications is your choice. And then taking it a step further maybe you want to enhance and extend your developer skills using EGL, then RDi SOA is your choice. That's a whole load of IBM product names so what does each one contain, and how will it help you?

If you want to code, compile then you must in my view be looking to move to the Rational Developer for System i forget green screen instead get used to this as your weapon of choice. Its a slimmed down version of the tools its been designed to be fast to start and remove all the bloat so you know exactly what you are doing. It sits on Eclipse and comes on 2 CD's for anyone who has installed previous versions of the tools you will know it was easy to create a hanging mobile the amount of CD's that you got.

If you want to go further and begin the process of application modernisation then Rational Developer for System i for SOA Construction (snappy title) or RDi for SOA for short is for you.  This introduces the latest version of EGL(Enterprise Generation Language) as well as including the functionality in the base RDi package, and also adds the HATS toolkit.

One of the things that WebSphere Commerce (WC) has always lacked is a good management interface. IBM made the decision many years ago that a browser would be best for managing your store and tasks. And to an extent back then this was a good idea, it gave people easy access to the functionality which could be used from anywhere. But the problem with this is its been left behind. No drag and drop, no sexy functionality and a lot of clicking for anyone administrating the site, usable yes but also past its sell by date given what can be done. And for anyone developing you may never have seen so much Javascript and unlike everything else in Commerce no structure like with Java.

After a lot of work at the end of December 2007 the Commerce team released the new tooling, which can hopefully overcome the above issues. Finally we do get drag and drop and a much better interface, and importantly we get something that developers can customise and build on, and that is very important.

If you want to see this in action then drop an email to bleddyn.williams@morpheus.co.uk or ivor.morgan@morpheus.co.uk

This is the store which is being managed by the tooling.

http://comexpweb.morpheus.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1

Bleddyn