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.