Postby jefffischer » Fri Sep 09, 2011 4:57 pm
As you know, Broadleaf Commerce does not currently offer product recommendations based on buying patterns. However, our customers have successfully integrated with third party products that mine Broadleaf sales data and expose APIs for making recommendations. One such product that has been successfully integrated is MyBuys [http://www.mybuys.com/]. Or, if you are interested in staying with open source, you could develop a custom approach using Apache Mahout and Hadoop. The latter of course will require more work.
The integration in general is pretty straightforward. The recommendation products want you to point them at your data (likely some snapshot that is updated on some regular basis) and then they provide a way to retrieve recommendations based on some context. I would probably develop this as an arbitrary spring service that could be included in a Spring MVC controller (if you're using Spring for the presentation layer) and this service would be called during the execution of the controller and the results could be passed back to the user on the view side.