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

Momentous Monks,

I'm faced with the dreaded Shopping Cart project. If I custom code it, it will be in Perl.

My question: is anyone still custom-coding shopping carts, or has the off-the-shelf-cart market matured to the point that custom coding is needless? Is anyone out there currently custom coding shopping cart backends in Perl?

This merchant has small volume (a few dozen transactions per day). They also have a very complicated price structure, with up to ten different prices for the same product depending on quantity of the product and quantity of related products in product groups, and the groups themselves tend to get re-defined a few times a year.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Just Another Shopping Cart?
by perrin (Chancellor) on May 14, 2004 at 18:16 UTC
    Yes, I'm writing one right now. Why don't I use an existing one? To begin with, there is a lot of variation in e-commerce apps, so an off-the-shelf system almost never does what you want. Customizing an existing one would be possible, except that most of them are very poorly written. For me to consider using an existing one, it would have to
    • use strict and warnings
    • have a test suite
    • run well under mod_perl
    • use a good templating system (and not one that was invented for the project!)
    I could go on, but that already eliminates the ones I've seen.
[reply]
Re: Just Another Shopping Cart?
by saintmike (Vicar) on May 15, 2004 at 00:58 UTC
    Simon Cozens published a great article on how to create a shopping cart: Part 1 and Part 2. Using his Maypole framework, there's actually very little code to be written.
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom