About Interchange
Interchange is an open source ecommerce system and application server/component application, written in the Perl programming language. Interchange is a powerful tool to automate and database-enable your web site. It is distributed under the GNU GPL version 2.
At its core, Interchange is a flexible and high-performance web application server that handles state and session management, authentication, click trails, filtering, URL encoding, security policy, and much more.
Interchange is well suited for a variety of purposes, and has been set up to perform sales, order processing, content management, customer service, reporting and analysis, personalization, traditional retail sales, digital goods delivery, B2B parts re-ordering, auctions, order status checking, supply chain management, project management, online collaboration, and even an MP3 jukebox.
Interchange is geared towards security. With the thousands of Interchange applications out there, we know of no huge security incidents. Some notable features are protection against SQL injection and XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerabilities, configurable “secure” (HTTPS) pages, good credit card information handling policies, GnuPG/PGP support, support for connecting to multiple databases from the same application, and system-defined filters for user input validation.
Interchange can be used as a completely self-contained standalone product, or as part of a larger system. It can be integrated with payment processing services, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, point-of-sale systems, accounting systems, external content management systems, other application servers, sales force automation systems, CRM (customer relationship management) systems, email campaign management systems, and remote databases on virtually any platform.
If you need functionality that Interchange doesn’t yet provide, you can incorporate it yourself in an extensible way that survives upgrades. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do so, there is a strong group of consultants present in the user community and available for complete commercial consultancy and support.
Thousands of people use Interchange and it has taken hundreds of millions of dollars worth of orders. But there is a definite learning curve required to customize Interchange. If you are looking to Interchange for e-commerce, and all you have to sell is a few simple items, it may well be overkill for your needs. If you, however, need a sophisticated ordering or content-management system with unlimited room to grow, Interchange may be right for you.
Active Core Team Members
Name | Since | Tasks |
Gert van der Spoel | Aug 2006 | Developer |
Greg Hanson | Sep 2004 | Developer |
Jon Jensen | Jun 2000 | Developer, release manager, sysadmin |
Marco Pessotto | May 2020 | Developer |
Mark Johnson | Feb 2003 | Developer |
Mike Heins | Aug 1995 | Interchange creator |
Peter Ajamian | Aug 2006 | Developer |
Peter Mottram | Oct 2014 | Interchange 6 developer |
Richard Templet | Oct 2014 | Developer |
Ron Phipps | Feb 2007 | Developer |
Sam Batschelet | Oct 2014 | Developer |
Stefan Hornburg | Jun 1999 | Interchange team captain, Debian package maintainer, I18N |
History of Interchange
See Interchange history to read the story of how we got here.
Site Areas
- About Interchange
- Live demo
- Gallery of sites running Interchange
- Downloads & source code
- Documentation
- Community resources (mailing lists etc.)
- Professional support
What Interchange users are saying:
First and foremost, a web application platform really must be a platform — it must play nicely with all the other things that your marketing and logistics and operations and vendor management groups want to bolt onto it. As such, the platform must be flexible, open, pliable, and also somewhat standardized.
Moreover, it needs to perform under screaming loads, as well as hold stable under the day-in-day-out slog of data that come with running a fair-sized web-centric business. Interchange meets all of these requirements.
We built a $100M+ company using Interchange both as a customer-facing web application suite as well as the the back-office web-based logistics platform for our buyers, marketers, and warehouse operations.
The Open Source outlook of Interchange, along with its Perl architecture, brings the needed flexibility and continuity throughout the app. A competent and experienced developer can take Interchange and make it sing.
Dave Jenkins, CTO at Backcountry.com