Windows & .NET Watch: Add to cart? Maybe not
December 15, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
If you are selling crocheted cell phone covers from your kitchen table, you can build your online store using a point-and-click solution from providers like Yahoo, Amazon or eBay. If you have a team of software developers sitting around idly after finishing their back-end business model, you’ll probably be inclined to build your e-commerce solution from scratch. If you’re anywhere in between, you might be tempted to investigate cart software.
Cart programs cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and provide a database schema and system data, lots and lots of dynamic pages in a tag-based development language (ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, etc.), and some HTML/CSS skins for modifying the look of the site. Ease of installation is emphasized: Choose an installation directory, provide your database credentials and stand back. Once the generally massive installation scripts are done, you will have a public-facing store and an internal-facing administrative interface. From that stage, you’ll be able to get to “Hello, e-commerce” very quickly.
The allusion to the classic “Hello, World” program was intentional, since cart software should not be viewed as a stand-alone application but rather as a domain-specific language (DSL).
If you are in any way serious about your e-commerce solution, your store must encode some domain knowledge. If you sell chickens, your store has to know about eggs and feed; if you sell rocket engines, you have to know about heat and pressure. The encoding and expression of that domain knowledge are what will determine your Web store’s success.
The administrative interface to your cart software will not look very language-like. The “just fill out a few forms” look can fool you (or the predecessors whose work you have to refactor—the more likely scenario for SD Times readers) into defining your products in a haphazard manner. Almost all cart software allows you to create custom fields (such as nib weight or rocket-fuel compatibility) and generally makes it easy to add some “validation JavaScript” (i.e., business rules).
The behind-the-scenes upshot of this work is a set of attributes and the ranges of their acceptable values (the attributes and values of, say, a pen or a rocket part)—in short, a type definition. But instead of being stored in a text file in a human-readable format, as would be the case with a normal program, the definition is stored in the database. Further, you’ll have stored values for various instances of your types, and those, too, will be stored in the database (albeit with a dose of metaprogramming; the values will be in rows that have foreign keys to a table that defines the attributes).
Related Search Term(s): cart, Web programming
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33110
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|