YC platform is a collection of web apps that interact with each other to provide full set of functions necessary to run online business, be it multiple shops or a single shop, managed by one or many organisations.
The cluster consists on one Admin node controlling one or more Storefront (SFx) nodes. Each SFx node is a storefront application. At the moment three types of application are implemented: Storefront website which comes in two flavours community (SFW) and enterprise (SFG) and REST API (API).
Typical platform ecosystem is depicted in figure 1.
Figure 1: Typical YC cluster
Storefront is customer facing website server that can host several websites. Themes mechanism allows to provide unique look and feel for each web shop and at the same time use theme inheritance to allow template code reuse to the maximum.
REST API is server is designed to provide the engine for applications that wish to utilise YC platform but provide alternative customer facing implementation. API features all functionality that is available in the web application implementation. Example use of REST API would be mobile app implementation that uses API calls to retrieve data from YC and place orders. Another example is using YC as the e-commerce engine which is accessed via Content Management System (CMS) such as Adobe CMS or Alfresco.
Communication between YUM and YeS nodes is performed either via Web Services channel or via multicasting (using JGroups) depending on the YC build options.
Detailed information on YC features and concepts can be found here: