Architecture

Litium is built in a three-tier architecture using standard Microsoft technologies, allowing great flexibility and offering high scalability and business critical reliability. It 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. 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.
 

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 accessible as regular .NET assemblies. The API is made up of common functionality in the foundation layer and six areas.

• Foundation layer: permissions, groups, users, authentication and authorization.
• Dashboard: dashboard widgets, top lists, Google Analytics.
• Websites: content management, web sites, content translations, digital marketing, product merchandizing.
• 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, documents, file categories, file versioning.

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

Solution

The solution consists of the 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.

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 to build a robust and reliable integration based on best practices.