Shopping carts

[Ghost]

A couple of questions...

1. About how hard is it to develop a shopping cart.
2. For those of you who make sites with shopping carts, do you write it from scratch or use a program to do it. (And if its a program, what program is it?)

[spinal007]

How hard?
Depends what you want it to do...
Some are VERY VERY simple, like this:
http://www.asp101.com/samples/shopping.asp

How to do it?
Write it from scratch.
Having a program do it for you is a quick solution that gradually deteriorates and becomes harder and harder to customize/maintain.
Coding it yourself means you have full control of how it works, you fully understand how it works, you can customize it as much as you like and you gain a lot more experience...

[Rob]

Personally, I would use cactuShop every time (if it's ASP).... it's low cost, and does everything you could possibly want.

http://www.cactushop.com

[snow]

Just out of curiosity, why do you work with ASP now ASP.net is around? D'you prefer it?

[Rob]

Some people have far more ASP knowledge than .NET knowledge (myself included), and others dont like the learning curve.

If you know neither, it makes far more sense to go with .NET

[spinal007]

If you're starting up, .NET is the best option...
but when you have years of experience with ASP, and hundreds of little genious bits of code fully tested and working wonders, the idea of re-doing all that work is just too much...

Actually, I tried. I started a .NET version of my CMS and it was really cool, but it would have taken me months to get it to do everything my old-school ASP CMS already does well...

[snow]

.NET seems to have a much quicker development time than ASP, as far as I can tell - and was strangely easy to pick up. I think it's cause it becomes almost graphical to program the form options with it.

I think it's worth switching to anyway - but I'm biased...

[Rob]

It's only graphical if you are using visual studio, or some other IDE....

Many coders will always prefer a text editor.

[snow]

That's true - but I'm not sure why you wouldn't use Visual Studio - they go together so beautifully. I'm all for writing code manually - but if I can do it in half the time graphically, and it outputs the same quality of code as I would (or exactly the code I would), I go for the quickest/simplest option.

I guess if you're not using VS then there wouldn't be a massive difference in dev time...

[spinal007]

When you're coding large applications, the visual side of things is the least important. I spend 70% of my time working on the 'engine' of my websites...
Which is I why I pick the language I'm 1. most confortable with, 2. most experienced with and 3. have the biggest library of snippets...

.NET beats ASP in every way: performance, simplicity, code clarity and quality, documentation, etc....
But old habits die hard!

[snow]

When I talk about graphical programming - I wasn't talking about the appearance of the page... rather, VS has graphical/wizard options for accessing your database, making queries, outputting the data from storage into logical structures (paged forms, tables, trees, ect.), and creating AJAX form elements...

It makes picking it up to begin with, or after you've not been using it for a while so much faster!