Restorecommerce is cloud native software which means it leverages contemporary deployment models such as containers and doesn’t solve problems which are already covered by typical cloud infrastructures. It grew up in the era of microservices and is therefore properly decomposed into such. Furthermore, it adheres to the principle of immutability whenever possible. This is a very powerful combination which makes Restorecommerce highly scalable and easy to evolve and to operate.

Semantic web technologies are the answer to many prevailing computer science problems of the past decade, such as the high coupling in distributed systems or interoperability on a data level. We are convinced that most of the potential gains have not yet been realized. As semantic web technologies are part of Restorecommerce’s DNA, you can benefit from their advantages today and continue to do so in the future.

Generally, structured data in Restorecommerce is semantically tagged to maximize machine readability and data Interoperability. This becomes more-and-more important as search engines already understand semantically tagged data and continuously extend their capabilities in this regard.

Structured, machine readable data sets published on the web become linked data if they are interlinked by meaningful relations. The list of publicly funded projects, governmental institutions, research facilities and commercial organizations which participate in this Web of Data is constantly growing. Many data sets are also published as linked open data under licenses which allow a commercial use. The key principle is that resources are identified by IRIs (URLs) which can be resolved to obtain a representation of that resource (dereferencing).

Restorecommerce is built entirely on linked data principles and allows to use existing linked data sets and keep them in sync as they evolve. This is for example important for what we call data commons which describes master data sets such as countries, languages, or country specific taxes. This is common knowledge and exists already in a machine readable formats — we think nobody should be required to set up tax rates in an online shop anymore.

A Restorecommerce based application has its individual API which is based on a flexible resource model. The resource model is the blueprint of the API as it defines:

The actual API is thus merely a reflection of the resource model.

API first! — every functionality in Restorecommerce is exposed as part of an API which strictly follows the REST architectural model. An API has the following notable qualities:

Efficient storage and retrieval of data is the essential discipline to succeed with any kind of distributed system arrangement.

Data privacy and integrity is a key concern of Restorecommerce. We adhere to the security by design principle to lower the efforts of application providers to meet their security goals.

Restorecommerce features OAuth 2.0 authentication and an advanced Attribute Based Access Control ABAC authorization model. This allows for manageable fine-grained access control.

Any kind of client such as classical web sites, native mobile apps based on Android, iOS etc., desktop applications and fat clients can be integrated with or can be built based on Restorecommerce.

HTML5 apps based on the single page application architecture are particularly well suited as client of a hypermedia API as they inherently support JSON and Ajax.