oscommerce alternatives

[Chris Hope]

Anyone know of any decent PHP/MySQL OSS ecommerce packages other than
osCommerce and ZenCart? From what I've seen of ZenCart it just appears to
be a fork of osCommerce and having now set a site up with osCommerce I have
seen what a mess it is.

It's great if you're happy just using the default layout but I wanted to use
a nice customised design and hacking it into osCommerce has been too much
hard work.

If there isn't much else around I may consider setting up my own OSS
ecommerce system, although I'd probably use the osCommerce database (and
some of their concepts) as a starting point as I believe the db structure
is pretty sound, although I'd set it up to work on more than one database
backend...

--
Chris Hope
The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

[Jay Donnell]

I'm slowly working on a shopping cart system in php/mysql. I'm not
sure what your looking for but we may be able to work together. Email
me if your interested.

Jay
ja********@yaho.com

add the o

Chris Hope <ch***@electrictoolbox.com> wrote in message news:<10**************@news.athenanews.com>...

Anyone know of any decent PHP/MySQL OSS ecommerce packages other than
osCommerce and ZenCart? From what I've seen of ZenCart it just appears to
be a fork of osCommerce and having now set a site up with osCommerce I have
seen what a mess it is.

It's great if you're happy just using the default layout but I wanted to use
a nice customised design and hacking it into osCommerce has been too much
hard work.

If there isn't much else around I may consider setting up my own OSS
ecommerce system, although I'd probably use the osCommerce database (and
some of their concepts) as a starting point as I believe the db structure
is pretty sound, although I'd set it up to work on more than one database
backend...

[Justin Koivisto]

Jay Donnell wrote:

I'm slowly working on a shopping cart system in php/mysql. I'm not
sure what your looking for but we may be able to work together. Email
me if your interested.

One thing for you to think about...

When you are working with databases in your project, you may want to
think ahead about database abstraction so that the code is more
portable. What I've found over the last few years is that you can easily
find a PHP/MySQL app to do most things, but if you stray and use
something else (like postgres, ms sql, oracle, etc.) the available
options dwindle exponentially.

I've started playing with PEAR::MDB lately. My reasoning is that I've
been using Metabase for a while, but really like the idea of the
availability that PEAR gives you for packages. No need to download all
the files and include them in each of your projects since there is a
common place for these already. Therefore, if you have 1 or 100 projects
on the same server using these files, you only have a single copy of
them, and they are very easy to upgrade when needed.

--
Justin Koivisto - sp**@koivi.com
PHP POSTERS: Please use comp.lang.php for PHP related questions,
alt.php* groups are not recommended.

[Chris Hope]

Justin Koivisto wrote:

I've started playing with PEAR::MDB lately.

I've been using PEAR:DB for about 15 months but wasn't aware of MDB until
you just posted it now. I'll have to check that out as well. I'd never
create any system for the masses that was tied to one DBMS as they should
have the choice about what they want to use :)

--
Chris Hope
The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

[Jay Donnell]

Does MDB allow you to use the column name in the result objet?

$row['fieldID'] instead of $row[0]

I know it becomes difficult to write portable code when you use the
column name in an abstraction layer because it is really database
specific. Some databases are case sensitive, some convert to
lowercase, etc with regards to colum names.

I use my own database class so that I can do my error handling in one
place rather than duplicating the code evertime I run a query. This
also allows me to use a flag that will echo the sql error to the
browser while I'm debugging and allow me to turn it off when I go
live. This class makes it very easy for me to switch to something like
MDB or AdoDB but I use column names to get the data in some of my code
which could cause a problem. I've been looking into using an
abstraction layer, but I probably need to clean up my use of column
names first.

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

Chris Hope <ch***@electrictoolbox.com> wrote in message news:<10**************@news.athenanews.com>...

Justin Koivisto wrote:

I've started playing with PEAR::MDB lately.

I've been using PEAR:DB for about 15 months but wasn't aware of MDB until
you just posted it now. I'll have to check that out as well. I'd never
create any system for the masses that was tied to one DBMS as they should
have the choice about what they want to use :)

It is somewhat interesting to see even phpSt.Justin is attracted
towards PEAR. For DB abstraction, I personally prefer phpBB's DB
abstraction than PEAR's as it is more fast and easy to handle. For me,
it is really a surprise that PEAR is attracting PHP saintz.

--
| Just another PHP saint |
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

ja********@yahoo.com (Jay Donnell) wrote in message news:<a6**************************@posting.google. com>...

Does MDB allow you to use the column name in the result objet?

$row['fieldID'] instead of $row[0]

I know it becomes difficult to write portable code when you use the
column name in an abstraction layer because it is really database
specific. Some databases are case sensitive, some convert to
lowercase, etc with regards to colum names.

I use my own database class so that I can do my error handling in one
place rather than duplicating the code evertime I run a query. This
also allows me to use a flag that will echo the sql error to the
browser while I'm debugging and allow me to turn it off when I go
live. This class makes it very easy for me to switch to something like
MDB or AdoDB but I use column names to get the data in some of my code
which could cause a problem. I've been looking into using an
abstraction layer, but I probably need to clean up my use of column
names first.

You should look into phpBB's abstraction layer. It has the stuff
you're looking for.

--
| Just another PHP saint |
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com

[Jay Donnell]

I looked at phpbb's code a while ago and I remember it looking a
little messy. I think they used an auto generated conf file to set a
db variable which they used to determine which db file to include and
for switch statements to determine which queries to use. I'll have to
look at it again when I get a chance.

Jay

[Justin Koivisto]

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

Chris Hope <ch***@electrictoolbox.com> wrote in message news:<10**************@news.athenanews.com>...

Justin Koivisto wrote:

I've started playing with PEAR::MDB lately.
I've been using PEAR:DB for about 15 months but wasn't aware of MDB until
you just posted it now. I'll have to check that out as well. I'd never
create any system for the masses that was tied to one DBMS as they should
have the choice about what they want to use :)

phpSt.Justin

Where did I get this kind of reputation? LOL
It is somewhat interesting to see even phpSt.Justin is attracted
towards PEAR.
For my intentions is the easy of deployment - less code to worry about
debugging, less files to throw into a directory, etc. Also, I had tried
a few DB abstraction classes when I first started that. Of the ones I
tried, Metabase had the best balance of efficiency, ease of use and
performance at the time. Since I was used to that, PEAR::MDB was a
natural progression. A few idiosyncrasies to learn, and a lot of method
names to change, but for the most part, it's a fairly painless upgrade
process.

Also, for the amount of projects that I've been working on, PEAR's
deployment/debugging/upgrade processes will be a great help to me.
For DB abstraction, I personally prefer phpBB's DB
abstraction than PEAR's as it is more fast and easy to handle. For me,
it is really a surprise that PEAR is attracting PHP saintz.

If things ever slow down enough for me, I've been thinking of jumping on
board with some of the PEAR projects to help development along. I think
that it's a great resource (now that I've discovered it). In many cases,
all that is needed is some efficiency tweaking for the PEAR package
classes. Granted, with the amount of abstraction and inheritance in the
PEAR library, things will be a little slower than other methods may be,
but (as in my case) the performance trade off vs. the developing,
debugging and deployment cycle is worth it.

--
Justin Koivisto - sp**@koivi.com
PHP POSTERS: Please use comp.lang.php for PHP related questions,
alt.php* groups are not recommended.

[Justin Koivisto]

Jay Donnell wrote:

Does MDB allow you to use the column name in the result objet?

$row['fieldID'] instead of $row[0]

I know it becomes difficult to write portable code when you use the
column name in an abstraction layer because it is really database
specific. Some databases are case sensitive, some convert to
lowercase, etc with regards to colum names.

This class makes it very easy for me to switch to something like
MDB or AdoDB but I use column names to get the data in some of my code
which could cause a problem. I've been looking into using an
abstraction layer, but I probably need to clean up my use of column
names first.

I know that MetaBase would allow it (I think you had to use specific
methods to do so), so I am assuming that MDB does as well. I haven't
used column names since I wrote my first MySQL connection class way back
in the day. ;)

--
Justin Koivisto - sp**@koivi.com
PHP POSTERS: Please use comp.lang.php for PHP related questions,
alt.php* groups are not recommended.

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

Justin Koivisto <sp**@koivi.com> wrote in message news:<_h*****************@news7.onvoy.net>...

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

<snip>

For DB abstraction, I personally prefer phpBB's DB
abstraction than PEAR's as it is more fast and easy to handle. For me,
it is really a surprise that PEAR is attracting PHP saintz.

If things ever slow down enough for me, I've been thinking of jumping on
board with some of the PEAR projects to help development along. I think
that it's a great resource (now that I've discovered it). In many cases,
all that is needed is some efficiency tweaking for the PEAR package
classes. Granted, with the amount of abstraction and inheritance in the
PEAR library, things will be a little slower than other methods may be,
but (as in my case) the performance trade off vs. the developing,
debugging and deployment cycle is worth it.

Thanks for your comments. I'm not complaining the contributors.
But, unfortunately after working with DB and SOAP packages, I lost the
spirit especially their error trapping mechanism is not upto my taste.
Anyway, I hope, the project will evolve as many people are been
attracted towards it.

--
| Just another PHP saint |
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com