From: Alan Garrison <alang@...>
Date: 2005-01-07T23:59:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Slightly OT: Re: [BOUNTY] Shopping cart ...

Nicholas Wieland wrote:

>I'm not a Rubyist, it's the first time I post here, I'm learning Ruby
>and Rails coming from Python, Zope and also PhP.
>I just want to say that I don't see any interesting solution in PhPland
>for e-commerce or content management. OSCommerce is ok for small shops,
>but start to reorganize it to support an important commercial brand and
>see: customization is a _pain_, there's no separation between logic and 
>views.  Thrust me, I've implemented in 2003 an e-commerce site for a
>_big_ corporation to serve more than 80 countries and I've tried every
>solution I was able to find, at the end I've implemented everything from
>scratch. There are also other problems, for example with OSCommerce you
>must use MySQL (and of course everything is hardcoded inside the
>application). Using MySQL for a big production site is, in my
>really-clueless-really-closeminded way of thinking, asking for pain.
>Content management is a different beast: nobody actually knows what
>exactly is a CMS, everyone has it's own version. I find PhP CMSs rather
>simple, I'd call them "Web Publishers" instead of CMS, and the problem is
>that central M :) I'd call Plone a CMS, it has the most important
>features: a CMS _must_ implement workflow, not just "permissions", it
>has to be customizable and extendable. And Plone is rather simple as a
>CMS, look at the products from Vignette or Documentum.
>I don't want to bash PhP or the PhP community, but sometimes their
>approach is a little too simplicistic.
>At least in Ruby I don't have to go through the search-install-try-#!?@%
>thing ;)
>
>  
>
This is why I mentioned Horde in another part of this thread.  I'm 
thinking if Ruby had a good, solid application base for general purpose 
apps, writing a shopping cart, a wiki, a CMS, whatever, would be easier 
than writing one from scratch since all the common core stuff is taken 
care of.  (Disclaimer, I know almost nothing about Rails and zero about 
IOWA).  Have one solid base that handles users, groups, ACLS, a neutral 
database layer, HTML templating, etc.  There are lots of little shopping 
carts out there, and regardless of what language they are written in 
they are typically small potatos that can't scale. 

I hope I don't come off as a Horde fanboy (I'm not, quite frankly I'm 
sick of looking at the gobs of PHP code), though I think the basic model 
is a good thing to build off of as opposed to writing lots of smaller 
apps from scratch.  For the shopping cart idea, consider things like who 
is going to administer the back end database, who is going to design the 
layout, who is going to handle payments, shipping, stock, etc.  I'm sure 
someone could easily roll out a Ruby shopping cart that handles a core 
set of requirements.  But freshmeat.net is chock full of these kinds of 
*basic* apps since someone's *basic* itch was scratched.  That's fine, 
just I think if the chosen language happens to be Ruby that this will 
probably just happen again.  If someone wants to write a killer app, 
they are going to need to approach it like one.  Having said that, a 
solid core application base which handles common things needed in 
shopping carts, cms's, email clients, etc, would make development easier.

I'll shut up now :)


>HAND,
>  ngw
>
>  
>