Technical architecture
This article describes the technical architecture of Litium Studio. Litium Studio is built in a three-tier architecture using standard Microsoft technologies, allowing great flexibility and offering support for large loads and business critical reliability.
Litium Studio system requirements are found here >>>
Litium Studio 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 or Elastic Search) is used for on-site and backoffice search.
Litium Studio installations can scale horizontally to multiple servers using a load balancer. Each server hosts an ASP.NET web application running Litium Studio. All web applications use the same database and optionally the same file storage (and search indices when using the Elastic Search engine).

Persistence layer
Litium Studio uses Microsoft SQL Server for storing application data and disc storage for files and search indeces.
Litium Studio API
Functionality and business logic is accessed through the Litium Studio 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.
- E-Commerce module: orders, campaigns, payments, deliveries and reports.
- Product Catalog module: product enrichment, assortments, categories, listings, product translations, stock balance and pricing.
- Web Publishing module: content management, web sites, content translations, digital marketing, product merchandizing.
- Relations module: customer management, personalization, customer segmentations, customer hierarchies.
- Media Archive module: images, documents, file categories, file versioning,
- Dashboard module: 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 Studio API and Litium Accelerator running as a standard ASP.NET application on Internet Information Server (IIS). Litium Studio 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 Studio 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 Studio integrations to cut project costs and risks and build a robust and reliable integration based on best practices.