in reply to The sad state of Perl + UPS Rate Requests

Off Topic - but since brig brought it up. We have accounts with all of the major shippers, and UPS is by far the most expensive and least "user friendly" for a small business. Fedex is good, but DHL was easily the best and it's unfortunate they had to terminate their domestic shipping service in the US. DHL ground packages shipped coast to coast one day faster than the others, packages were accepted 2 hours later in the day, and even small nobody companies like ours got our own account rep who would deal personally with any problems or requests. All this and they were also the lowest cost shipper.

Back On Topic - I had requested and received a copy the DHL shipping API documentation with the intention of writing a module, but due to cirmstances mentioned above it never got off the ground. While toying with the idea, it occurred to me that perhaps something along the lines of the DBI/DBD modules would make sense here.

Rather than various people writing complete shipping systems from scratch, perhaps we need a standard Perl API for shipping, and a universal interface to a set backend modules that can be written for each shipper. If anyone wants to work on this idea I'll be happy to participate. 

ShipAPI
ShipAPI::DHL
ShipAPI::Fedex
ShipAPI::UPS
ShipAPI::USPS
...etc

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Re^2: The sad state of Perl + UPS Rate Requests
by jdrago_999 (Hermit) on Mar 28, 2009 at 00:34 UTC

    I like your idea of ShipAPI::*.

    This is the kind of hard work that should only really be done (well) once.

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      I agree wholeheartedly. Who wants to organize it? I'd love to help.


      I'm a Linux user. You wouldn't know it since I mostly ask Windows questions. Whee.
      If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so.
      - Richard Dawkins
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        I'm looking to start developing something similar for Australia Post, but not too soon. I have an idea of the details involved, so I wouldn't mind contributing some coding time to this.
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Re^2: The sad state of Perl + UPS Rate Requests
by swordfish (Initiate) on Aug 06, 2009 at 21:04 UTC
    My gosh, that's a great idea!!! I have tried to implement those many unfinished UPS shipping PERL Mods on CPAN into my shipping system. I ran into the same issues as the previous poster's and some of the Mods have too many dependencies. It's time to build a ShipAPI. It's not a crazy idea. How can I contribute?
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