One type of web application I have worked a lot with throughout my career is shopping carts. The first shopping cart software I worked with was Site Server Commerce 3.0 on an NT 4.0 box with IIS. After working with that for 3.5 years, I had decided to write my own shopping cart software due to the limitations of the product that made me feel SSCE was more of a crutch then anything.
I wrote an Online Canadian Pharmacy Ecommerce store with order fulfillment and product catalog for two guys I used to work with using ASP with SQL from the ground up. We were limited in what technology we could use at the time due to no hosting provider wanting to take on an Online Pharmacy. This left us with Windows-based hosting even though both the client and myself would have preferred it been developed on a LAMP box.
I started learning PHP by writing a new shopping cart application originally in PHP 4 proceduraly and then again in PHP5 with Classes (but still need to push to sprocs). At some point in the future, I would love to do it again with both ASP.NET and Java/JSP. I have found this the easiest way to pickup new programming languages – rewriting an application you know well in the new language.
Whew! Sorry for the lagging posts. I was on vacation for 2.5 weeks and then sick the last two weeks. Nothing like spending the last few days of vacation with the flu :o(
I was hoping to have posted more during my vacation but I guess sometimes you just need to unplug. I have been thinking more about why I started this blog and where I wanted to take it. In thinking this, I was realizing I have not really blogged about programming which is part of the reason I started this blog! Part of the reason the thought to blog about programming was not coming to mind was due to my own lack of programming! I have started back into a project I have been hoping to launch by Fall of 2008.
I have done my fair share of online tutorials and searching for how to draw the line between requirements gathering, application design, and implementing the project. I have also searched for some good tutorials showing how you truly separate the layers of your n-tier web application. The tutorials and technology these days are better and appear to be less “theoretical” and more “practical” in implementing those layers.
What I am interpreting in these ventures online is that people can code but not necessarily how to break down a project into pieces to be coded. I am hoping I can start to fill that void using some of the thought processes coming up as I go through the web application I want to launch this Fall.
If you are wanting to learn how to code an object-oriented shopping cart application in PHP, subscribe to my blog for upcoming posts on how to go about doing this! I don’t think my working on a shopping cart in PHP is a secret so lets start there. I am hoping this will also get more readers registering and commenting asking questions as we go along. So… let’s get started!
