Hi,
I was very happy to see the good review of Bricolage. This general topic of
mod_perl applications has very much been on my mind the last few weeks. I had
to start looking for an out of the box solution for a shopping cart because
my own work was getting interruptioned too often and the elapsed time since I
started the project was too long for my bosses. Of course they are the ones
who produced the interruptions :) I had been working on a "shopping cart"
system for my companies widely geographicly distrubuted web servers. The
quotes are because what people call shopping carts now has changed quite a
bit from when I first started doing web programming. Now a shopping cart
means content management, product/inventory management, shipping
calculations/intergration, affiliate related functions, marketing
ploys(pricing schemes, mailing list signups etc) and most horrible of all
shopping carts now days seem to think they have to be responsable for the
merchant integration as well. Also few products of any kind support more than
a half dozen or so merchants. This part amazes me, most merchants provide
some sort of POST over https method, a simple maping from your parm names to
theirs gets you there with 90% of them but I have not seen one single app of
any lang do this. I mean geese, two multi select boxes and some stuff for
reseting required fields and formating the exp date and you would be done.
The exception to this is where the merchant provider has decided to start
trying to value add crap of their own, some of them require a "Sale" to be
created and then on a second reqest the card info is posted. This stuff
really pisses me off. A merchant account exists so that your customers can
pay you with a credit card. It seems that there is an ongoing competition
between various types of service application providers to "do it all" for
you.
Of course there is a wide WIDE selection of PHP carts. Many of them are crap.
But what I am finding is that most perl based carts are crap too. There are a
lot of half assed attempts at a cart system in perl but all of the ones I
have looked at are missing key functions, but most importantly are not backed
up by a professional looking company. BTW for me one of those key functions
is a very flexable pricing system.
So the question, does anyone know of a mod_perl based shopping cart system
that does have most of the features I mentioned above and have a reliable
company behind it? The example I would go by in this is
http://www.shopsite.com They produce a C/CGI based cart that produces static
html and does have all of these features. But of course they are closed
source and that is where things like the merchant integration becomes a bit
of a pain if your merchant account is not one they support directly.
As a general issue this does also relate back to the hosting issue talked
about a while ago. If mod_perl based hosting is hard to find, then why could
companies product a mod_perl based cart? It is close to insane to do that
right now unless you are really focusing on the so called enterprise level
customer. But few companies need a great deal more than what somethin like
shopsite offers, so anyone getting into that is already really limiting their
market. Again why would someone do that?
Another question that comes up is that with Bricolage it seems it would not be
that hard to build and maintain a cart system. I would bet that with all of
the Mason users out there this has been done at least a few times.
This is a jumbled email for sure, but I hope it might start some discussion
and that I might even be able to learn about a Perl product that I can be
proud to show my bosses. Remember flaming is illegal here! :)
Eric
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I was very happy to see the good review of Bricolage. This general topic of
mod_perl applications has very much been on my mind the last few weeks. I had
to start looking for an out of the box solution for a shopping cart because
my own work was getting interruptioned too often and the elapsed time since I
started the project was too long for my bosses. Of course they are the ones
who produced the interruptions :) I had been working on a "shopping cart"
system for my companies widely geographicly distrubuted web servers. The
quotes are because what people call shopping carts now has changed quite a
bit from when I first started doing web programming. Now a shopping cart
means content management, product/inventory management, shipping
calculations/intergration, affiliate related functions, marketing
ploys(pricing schemes, mailing list signups etc) and most horrible of all
shopping carts now days seem to think they have to be responsable for the
merchant integration as well. Also few products of any kind support more than
a half dozen or so merchants. This part amazes me, most merchants provide
some sort of POST over https method, a simple maping from your parm names to
theirs gets you there with 90% of them but I have not seen one single app of
any lang do this. I mean geese, two multi select boxes and some stuff for
reseting required fields and formating the exp date and you would be done.
The exception to this is where the merchant provider has decided to start
trying to value add crap of their own, some of them require a "Sale" to be
created and then on a second reqest the card info is posted. This stuff
really pisses me off. A merchant account exists so that your customers can
pay you with a credit card. It seems that there is an ongoing competition
between various types of service application providers to "do it all" for
you.
Of course there is a wide WIDE selection of PHP carts. Many of them are crap.
But what I am finding is that most perl based carts are crap too. There are a
lot of half assed attempts at a cart system in perl but all of the ones I
have looked at are missing key functions, but most importantly are not backed
up by a professional looking company. BTW for me one of those key functions
is a very flexable pricing system.
So the question, does anyone know of a mod_perl based shopping cart system
that does have most of the features I mentioned above and have a reliable
company behind it? The example I would go by in this is
http://www.shopsite.com They produce a C/CGI based cart that produces static
html and does have all of these features. But of course they are closed
source and that is where things like the merchant integration becomes a bit
of a pain if your merchant account is not one they support directly.
As a general issue this does also relate back to the hosting issue talked
about a while ago. If mod_perl based hosting is hard to find, then why could
companies product a mod_perl based cart? It is close to insane to do that
right now unless you are really focusing on the so called enterprise level
customer. But few companies need a great deal more than what somethin like
shopsite offers, so anyone getting into that is already really limiting their
market. Again why would someone do that?
Another question that comes up is that with Bricolage it seems it would not be
that hard to build and maintain a cart system. I would bet that with all of
the Mason users out there this has been done at least a few times.
This is a jumbled email for sure, but I hope it might start some discussion
and that I might even be able to learn about a Perl product that I can be
proud to show my bosses. Remember flaming is illegal here! :)
Eric
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For additional commands, e-mail: advocacy-help@perl.apache.org