This article describes the technical architecture of Litium. Litium is built in a three-tier architecture using standard Microsoft technologies, allowing great flexibility and offering high scalability and business critical reliability.
Three layers
Litium runs as a standard ASP.NET web application on Internet Information Server (IIS), storing data in a Microsoft SQL Server database and storing files on disc. A search engine (Lucene.Net) is used for on-site and backoffice search.
Litium 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.

Persistence layer
Litium uses Microsoft SQL Server for storing application data and disc storage for files and search indeces.
Litium API
Functionality and business logic is accessed through the Litium API accesible as regular .Net Assemblies. The API is made up of common functionality in the "Foundation" layer and six modules.
- Foundation layer: permissions, groups, users, authentication and authorization.
- Sales: orders, campaigns, payments, deliveries and reports.
- Products: product enrichment, assortments, categories, listings, product translations, stock balance and pricing.
- Websites: content management, web sites, content translations, digital marketing, product merchandizing.
- Customers: customer management, personalization, customer segmentations, customer hierarchies.
- Media: images, documents, file categories, file versioning,
- Dashboard: dashboard widgets, top lists, google analytics.
Each module has several extension points called plugins. Plugins are built using dependency injection (IoC).
Solution
The solution consists of the customer specific adjustements, 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 requests for all anonymously accessible files and/or images. Zurb Foundation is used as the responsive web UI framework.
Integration
Litium Integration Kit is used to integrate towards ERP and PIM systems. It contains both a Windows Services and Web Services part. We recommend that you use this add-on for all Litium integrations to cut project costs and risks and build a robust and reliable integration based on best practices.
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