Architecture

Litium is built in a three-tier architecture. It is flexible, offers high scalability, as well as business-critical reliability. 

The platform uses standard Microsoft technologies. It runs as a standard ASP.NET web application on Internet Information Server (IIS).

The installations can scale horizontally to multiple servers using a load balancer.

Each server hosts an ASP.NET web application running Litium.

All web applications use the same database and the same file storage.

Full-size image

Persistence layer

Application data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Disc storage is used for files and search indexes.

Litium API

Functionality and business logic are accessed through the Litium API accessible as regular .NET assemblies.

The API is made up of common functionality in the foundation layer and in the six areas below.

Foundation layer: permissions, groups, users, authentication, and authorization.

Areas:

• Dashboard: dashboard widgets.
• Websites: content management, websites, content translations, digital marketing, product merchandising.
• Products: product enrichment, assortments, categories, listings, product translations, stock balance, and pricing.
• Sales: orders, campaigns, payments, deliveries, and reports.
• Customers: customer management, personalization, customer segmentation, customer hierarchies.
• Media: images, files, movies, and file folders.

Each area has several extension points called plugins. Plugins are built using dependency injection (IoC).

Solution

The solution consists of customer-specific adjustments, the Litium API, and Litium Accelerator running as a standard ASP.NET application on Internet Information Server (IIS). 

Litium has built-in support for edge-cache CDN to reduce the number of requests for all anonymously accessible files and/or images. Zurb Foundation is used as the responsive web UI framework.