Building RIA Consumer Shopping Experiences

(Real-World Flex Seminar)

Fumi Matsumoto, Co-founder and CTOAllurent

fm@allurent.com

Background

Allurent – Rich Internet Application for Commerce

Flex OEM since early 2005

Product #1: Allurent BUY

Based on Flex 1.5

Shopping cart / Order capture and Checkout

Customizable looks and behavior

Integrates to existing e-commerce applications

…demo

BUY Architecture

Standard Flex 1.5 architecture

AMF to Flex server

Our own event messaging layer

Very high performance and scalable

XML over HTTP for integration (among other strategies)

Challenges

Client performance

State synchronization after “crossed” messages

Ease of skinning

Product/Catalog data model

Analytics

Event capture architecture

Omniture ActionSource

BUY Future

Move to Flex2!

Tools

Skinning

…and of course new features (but outside scope of this talk)

Product #2: Allurent SHOP

Not yet announced: Still in active development

Consumer shopping application (not a “web” application!)

Allurent SHOP Pieces

Client-side “motor”

Business user app for…

Flash component assembly (“shopping experience authoring”)

Data overlay (“merchandising”)

Allurent Server

…demo

Core Concepts and Design Decisions

Need for dynamic assembly of shopping experience

-> Allurent Shopping Markup Language (ASML)

Need for Retailers to differentiate

-> Component Kit

Content Integration (product catalog)

-> RDF

Extras…

Allurent Development Environment

Testing

Unresolved Issues

Bookmarking

Search engine indexing

Flex 2: The Verdict So Far…

Two thumbs up!

Tool

Performance

Source code

New VM seems solid

Want asset caching

Not using FDS at the moment

What have WE learned?

We learned that we can…

Create Expressive Flex applications!

Use Flex components in applications with dynamic assembly

Combine Flex and Flash to leverage strengths of both

Rich Internet Applications for Commerce