RoR on-line store or OSCommerce?

Rails
1

Hello everyone,

I am in the process or searching for some info that will help me
deciding what is better
-1) to create my own on-line store in RoR or
-2) to use the open source solutio Oscommerce

What will be the pros and cons to create from scratch my own RoR on-line
store?

Please advice

2

Hi Jose,

Not a direct answer to your question, but here are two resources to
check out:
I have both these books and they are both good value !

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/rails-ecommerce
http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10178

Both available as e-books, so outlay is minimal !

HTH - Dave P.

On Apr 23, 8:26 am, Jose P. [email protected]

3

or use an existing rails ecommerce host, like http://shopify.com/ ?

4

Oscommerce is a terrible mess of spaghetti code. It’s architecture
violates
most of the principles of software design we’re so eagerly pursuing in
rails.

Business logic mixed right into the HTML. (a very PHP-centric design)
No unit tests.
A very rigid page flow that’s a headache to alter.

You may notice that it’s been years since oscommerce’s last release:
2.2.

On the other hand, if you want something that works out of the box,
don’t
intend to touch the code, and don’t mind asking your customers to click
through some slightly annoying forms, have a look at oscommerce.

5

Trevor S.,

What about RoR solutions?

wrote:

Oscommerce is a terrible mess of spaghetti code. It’s architecture
violates
most of the principles of software design we’re so eagerly pursuing in
rails.

Business logic mixed right into the HTML. (a very PHP-centric design)
No unit tests.
A very rigid page flow that’s a headache to alter.

You may notice that it’s been years since oscommerce’s last release:
2.2.

On the other hand, if you want something that works out of the box,
don’t
intend to touch the code, and don’t mind asking your customers to click
through some slightly annoying forms, have a look at oscommerce.

6

Depending on your needs you may be better off doing a custom Rails
store. I
did one and documented at lot of my notes on my blog:

http://clickablebliss.com/blog/2007/03/11/building_the_store/

~ Mike

7

My experience is that if you plan to modify anything (even just the
look/feel) it’s cheaper in the long run to make if from scratch. Every
time
we’ve tried to “save time” by using something like OSCommerce it’s ended
up
costing us more in time spent than if we had just built it from scratch.
One alternative might be shopify, as has been mentioned. I’ve never
done a
production site using it, but I’ve played around with it quite a bit.
Looks
like it’s super easy to design themes for it, and it’s very feature
rich.

Good luck!

–

Nathan Garza

AshLeaf Media | President

www.ashleafmedia.com | [email protected] | 832.514.5726

8

I have Found this:

http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct

9

Mike Zornek,

have you tried http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct ??

wrote:

Depending on your needs you may be better off doing a custom Rails
store. I
did one and documented at lot of my notes on my blog:

http://clickablebliss.com/blog/2007/03/11/building_the_store/

~ Mike