The open source Rails/Flex eCommerce application now has a name - XChain - pronounced cross-chain. I had some air travel time over the weekend and put it to good use coming up with a name, the basic premise being that the app should really be classified as a Supply Chain Management system as it deals with a lot more than simply taking peoples money for a product. (Order fulfillment, shipment tracking, eventually CRM and inventory management), and being a cross of two major technologies it seems to fit. Catchy enough and has meaning. Well I think so anyway, others might disagree - (that’s what the comments form at the bottom is for…), only downer is XChain.com is taken by some spammer, but I’ve snapped up .ca and other appropriate domains.

To this end, I’ve also created a home for it here http://code.google.com/p/xchain/ which seems to be a good location for now, satisfies the free and accessible by SVN requirements. Alas no RSS feed, so stick to here for the updates.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch, and have to a little more digging, but have basically decided on a license for it. The Mozilla Public License. My wish is that anyone will be able to use it for either non-commercial and commercial applications free of charge. The only restriction is if you extend it, you have to provide source code back to the community. I believe this is fair enough as you will be getting a tonne of usable code out of the box to start with. I just need to check that we can provide mechanisms for companies sensitive proprietary processes - to make sure these can be wrapped up in a separate lib, or DSL stored in the db, to make sure that doesn’t need to be opened up to the outside world.

Final decision of the day is to go with Cairngorm - this has more exposure so will hopefully appeal to a wider base of developers, and seems more suited to the scale of this application. I also found a Cairngorm Rails code generator via onrails.org which looks like it will do the business saving time generating code.

Right, time to get some code into that repository…. in the meantime feel free to let me know your thoughts on the name and license choice.