Perl e-commerce?

[James Laver]

On 14 Sep 2011, at 12:20, Mallory van Achterberg wrote:

> Yes, I actually got acquainted with Firebug solely for dealing with
> Magento front-end. And the reliance on Javascript to do things that
> belong to HTML, CSS and the server was gross.
> 
> Yet people use it. 

Ah, you've shared that pain. People use it because it can be made to do anything (fairly impressive, I'll grant) and it's the only free php shopping cart that isn't riddled with 20 billion security holes (don't even get me started on oscommerce or ZenCart)...

> Does this project contain a front-end like most of the popular
> shopping carts have? Or plan to? 
> (I hope that if it does, that at least it doesn't make the mistake
> of overly-complicated, Javascript-dependent fixed-width crap the
> others do)

Well, it will do, it's still in the planning stage (and dependent on a few of the improvements coming to Spark (my forms handling module that's nearing v2)). It's a broad topic, please feel free to contact me offlist or on irc if you'd like more information.

> My question isn't because I'm personally looking for a shopping
> cart to use myself, or for a client (at least, not yet). My question
> is because, I see it as another reason web developers don't even
> consider Perl for these things. Which makes no sense to me.
> Suppose you're running Perl on your server for other things, and then
> you want a regular, normal, supported e-commerce system? Crap, now
> you've got Perl and PHP running and fighting with each other. Waste.

Not only that, but with the recent crypt() bug and the number of failing test cases they released stable php 5.4 (a massively looked-forward-to release because it badly implements traits, which is still enough to blow most PHP devs' minds, which means lots of people upgraded on release day and suffered that security hole...) with, I'm not letting it anywhere near any hardware I have to deal with maintaining or sharing a server with any of my stuff.  It's just not worth the risk.

> If I knew a client wanted a site, and decided on, say, Dancer, and
> knew they wanted later on to add a shop... 

While I like Dancer, the plans are more complicated than that, so in theory it's a Catalyst app. Thankfully now they've moved to plack, integrating apps under any selection of frameworks is ridiculously easy with Plack::Builder's 'mount' function.

/j