mod_perl applications

[Eric Frazier <ef...@kwinternet.com>]

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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Re: mod_perl applications

[si...@siberian.org]

I'll vouch for MiniVend also, we used it for a few years 
and really enjoyed it. It became a bit difficult to 
maintain and when RedHat picked it up we phased it out (as 
we did Stronghold, not big RedHat Corporate fans over 
here).

Time to take another look!

John-

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 09:03:21 -0500
  Frank Wiles <fr...@wiles.org> wrote:
>On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 12:51:32 -0700
>Eric Frazier <ef...@kwinternet.com> wrote:
>
>
>> 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. 
>
>  You might want to look at Interchange, formally 
>MiniVend.  It's very
>  full featured, but I will be the first to admit it 
>isn't the easiest
>  to use.  It used to be supported by Red Hat, but now I 
>believe is 
>  maintained by a community of users.  The website is
>  http://www.icdevgroup.com
>
> ---------------------------------
>   Frank Wiles <fr...@wiles.org>
>   http://www.wiles.org
> ---------------------------------
>
>
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Re: mod_perl applications

[Frank Wiles <fr...@wiles.org>]

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 12:51:32 -0700
Eric Frazier <ef...@kwinternet.com> wrote:


> 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. 

  You might want to look at Interchange, formally MiniVend.  It's very
  full featured, but I will be the first to admit it isn't the easiest
  to use.  It used to be supported by Red Hat, but now I believe is 
  maintained by a community of users.  The website is
  http://www.icdevgroup.com

 ---------------------------------
   Frank Wiles <fr...@wiles.org>
   http://www.wiles.org
 ---------------------------------


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