DealersSys 2

Features

DealerSys is a retail e-commerce system for businesses which do not fit mainstream e-commerce systems. It has evolved out of work done for two clients, one a specialist antique dealer, the other a sawmill. Specifically it is designed to handle

Unique and one off items;
Items sold be weight, length, area or volume;
Items with multiple variants;
Items with negotiable price.

DealerSys is designed to handle multiple currencies, and automatically to calculate shipping charges for different sized consigmnents to different destinations globally. It provides customer relationship management, automatically mailing customers when new items and content are added to categories in which they are interested.

Styling and presentation

DealerSys 2 generates its content as fairly plain XHTML, but it is XHTML which is designed and optimised to be transformed with XSL to flexibly add more sophisticated styling. XSL stylesheets can be uploaded to the system and tagged to categories so that different categories can be styled differently. The transformation is applied server side, and pages which do not contain customer-specific information are cached.

System Requirements

DealerSys 2 is built as a webapp compliant with the Java servlet 2.3 specification, and must be deployed in a Servlet Container; we strongly recommend Tomcat either version 4 or version 5. In principle other Servlet 2.3 servlet containers should work but they are untested. The system requires a RDBMS and although in principle any industrial strength ANSI 92 compliant RDBMS should do in practice only Postgres versions 7 and 8 are supported.

Dependencies

Components shipped with DealerSys2
File	Contents	Produced by	License
activation.jar	Java Activation Framework	Sun Microsystems	Sun Microsystems, Inc. Binary Code License Agreement
crimson.jar	XML Parser	Apache Software Foundation	Apache License
jacquard.jar	Jacquard Toolkit	Web Engineering Factory and Toolworks	BSD
mail.jar	Java Mail	Sun Microsystems	Sun Microsystems, Inc. Binary Code License Agreement
postgresql.jar	Postgres JDBC Driver	PostgreSQL Global Development Group	BSD
regexp.jar	Regular Expression parser	Apache Software Foundtion	Apache License
saxon.jar	SAXON XSLT Processor	Michael Kay	Mozilla

License

DealerSys 2 is released under the GNU General Public License, the original and best open source license.

Development Status

DealerSys 2 isn't really finished, but it is already in active use on live systems.

Xylodom (McConnell Wood Products) were the first customer for DealerSys2 and have been using it for a year now; it has run reliably and without major problems.

EarlyTech (Michael Bennett-Levy trading as Early Technology) was the main customer for the original DealerSys and is presently converting to DealerSys 2 - his system will probably be live before you read this.

However, neither of these sites is using online transactions or making serious use of the stock control or auction management systems, so these systems are completely untested and largely unfinished.

Further Development

You are of course entitled to download the source code from SourceForge, develop it as you will, and use it as you like. If you want to do this I would strongly urge you to register as a developer on SourceForge and ask for developer access to the project CVS. That way, your code stays in sync with our development, and everyone benefits from all the enhancements made. If you are not able to carry out development yourself but you need new features or to have existing bugs fixed, please register your bug reports and feature requests in the SourceForge Tracker. I shall be developing DealerSys 2, and seeking new customers for it, anyway, and requests made through SourceForge will get handled in time. However, if you need new new development quickly, I am most happy to quote for specific enhancements - feel free to mail me.

Configuring and Installing

New with the 2.0.7 release is an installer built using antinstaller. Antinstaller is itself beta, and one of the issues with it being beta is that the full text of prompts is not printed. Nevertheless the installer does work and if you want to play with DealerSys the first thing to do is probably to download the installer. Install using

java - jar dealersys2-2.0.7-installer.jar

Or, on Windows boxes, just by double clicking the file.

WEFT Simon Brooke trading as the Web Engineering Factory and Toolworks, Auchencairn, Scotland, 10th February 2002