Re: Shopping Cart Project

I think I can fill the role of minor critic ;-). A couple points/questions:

What role do you see C having in this? The most critical aspects here seems to be the webserver and database - both of which are already in C. If you're using perl at all, which you say you are, I'm not sure where else you plan on drawing the lines.
What platform(s) do you plan to support? If it includes Windows, is there a plan for this? I presume IIS support is right out.
Your choice of DB is interesting. Without attempting to start a flamewar on this, I'd like to point out that flamewars on choice of DB happen. Depending on how large you see this growing, you may be alienating many potential users. Are you planning to have a database-abstraction layer to allow Oracle, DB2, and PostgreSQL bigots all have their chance to implement drivers for their favourite database? How will that look?
Javascript seems to be a sore point around here sometimes... ;-)

Ok, that's about all the critiquing I can do... ;->

Comment on Re: Shopping Cart Project - interested?

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Re^2: Shopping Cart Project - interested? by moltar (Novice) on Feb 25, 2005 at 22:00 UTC
Thank you for taking your time to read and answer. C might be used in the project. It could be used for driving a high traffic shop's front end or could be used for an API. This is not something I really want to do, but it's a possibility. I figured it will raise some discussion :) I would prefer to support both Apache and IIS. Database-abstraction layer is a great idea. And multiple database support was something I thought about, but did not include into the outline. I think all development will be done on MySQL anyways. JavaScript use will be very limited. JS will be used to enhance user experience. No critical features will be written in JS.	[reply]
Re^3: Shopping Cart Project - interested? by Tanktalus (Canon) on Feb 25, 2005 at 22:14 UTC
Thanks for your answers. I'm not sure how depending on mod_perl will work when trying to support IIS. The Javascript answer is disconcerting. Not because I'm anti-JS. Nor am I pro-JS. Just that my experience is that saying a feature will only be used for some things ends up getting it used for all things. Your JavaScript expert will want a feature that should be implemented in perl. But the perl guys don't have time, so the JS guy will just go ahead and implement it. I've seen that type of thing happen before - either it's too big of an itch to wait, or whatever. It can take a lot of project management skills to keep in line. In many ways, it's cheaper/easier to just discard JS use, or accept that it will be used for anything and everything. To be honest, I've never managed to get MySQL set up on my RHEL3 box. DB2, however, was easy. But maybe that's just me. Regardless, database abstraction is unlikely to be successfully accomplished on a single database platform. Just like developing a cross-platform Java tool ... and everyone develops it on Windows. (Seen that before, too.) Or even a cross-platform perl utility - and only running it on Linux.	[reply]
Re^4: Shopping Cart Project - interested? by moltar (Novice) on Feb 25, 2005 at 22:21 UTC
then IIS can go to hell :) jk JS could be used for supplimental form validation (of course it will be validated server side as well). It could also be used for folding/unfolding items. I have many ideas. But none of the JS use is supposed to limit user experience. Users that have JS disabled won't loose anything. Users that have JS will gain.	[reply]