http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=45403

Kiko has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: Shopping Cart
by jptxs (Curate) on Dec 07, 2000 at 05:23 UTC

    My simple answer is no. A shopping cart implies a lot of things. Let's start by making the arbitrary assumption that you already have a way to process completed orders. This means you have a secure, working way to take some message sent from your system and process the credit card info from it (again securely) and turn that into a real order that will be shipped and tracked and so on.

    Assuming you have that all wrapped up, then what you're asking about is a way to create and store and deliver that message to the magical order processing system. What that boils down to is maintaining state. This is something many wiser than I have covered:

    What you're task is is to take some token - an id with password, an email address - and associate that with some list of values - the items in the cart. You may want to make it simple, i.e. you create as you go and then you check out or dump it. Or you may want people to be able to shop a bit now, shop a bit later. The more features means the more complexity.

    You may want to poke around on http://freshmeat.net/ and http://sourceforge.org/ to see if you can find what you need there.

    Also, you should see CPAN for modules to help with creating sessions, which would be the key to the more advanced features.

    "A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the seriousness on +e had as a child, at play." --Nietzsch +e
      So here's a thought. Are there any perl scripts that can handle the credit card transactions through a socket? I don't think I've seen one in my browsing through CPAN, but I have to admit, I've never looked for one.

      Seems like some code somewhere has to exist to process transactions... I mean, people are doing it all the time. But I haven't seen it done in perl, and I can't think of any particular reasons why it wouldn't be suited to the job...

Re: Shopping Cart
by Petruchio (Vicar) on Dec 07, 2000 at 07:04 UTC
    Yams is a Free shopping cart written in Perl, for use with MySql. I've never used it, but I recommend it highly on the strength of its cute logo.

    O'Reilly's JavaScript Application Cookbook contains a sample shopping cart application. You may download it thus. Please don't ask me how I know this.

    Using my secret device, I was able to find PerlShop, which turns out to be a Shopping Cart written in Perl. It's hosted by ARPAnet.com. Apparently the folks who founded the internet have found a more lucrative alternative to bake sales.

    I have no experience with any of these. Good luck.

Re: Shopping Cart
by gt8073a (Hermit) on Dec 08, 2000 at 01:33 UTC