This may appear as a subjective question but i am asking from an technical architect point of view.
What would be your choice if you were building E-Commerce based Application to help giant companies carry out their marketing and sales campaigns. I looked into open source frameworks such as Magento that works with ZendFramework using the PHP,MySQL And Apache stack. Other basic frameworks like OSCommerce seem reasonable. Whats the leading E-Commerce framework for .Net Technologies? I also looked into Zoho and it seems like using their applications most of the requirements can be knocked off but I also feel I may face flexibility issues down the line with what they provide.
Please try to mention what architectural benefits do you see in the frameworks you know about. Thanks, as always, and its always great to hear the expert opinions on stackoverflow.
For "Giant companies" your question is formed badly and has no information to actually answer it.
For micro and middle sized companies (10 -500 persons in company) go for Magento EE or Magneto CE version and Magento optimized hosting solution
Related
A friend of mine asked me to take a look at using Flex Licensing to protect the distribution of her software. I've spent a bit of time going through the flexera website to see what information I could glean, but I find nothing that tells me how one actually connects their software to the licensing system. Is it an API that allows me to build the functionality into an application? Is it something else? I decided to not put too much time into getting frustrated before asking here if anyone had any experience with this or similar licensing systems.
Regards and thanks!
To answer your question, yes, there is an API.
You can request a trial of their FlexNet Publisher Software to see if it is something you would like to work with. However, I would recommend you contact them to see if their pricing model would fit into your friend's development budget.
I am a Web Developer student still in uni, hoping to start my own business in the future. I have built and deployed several static websites, and have recently built and deployed a couple of WordPress sites. My DB experience so far is largely conceptual.
I have been approached by a 'friend of a friend' to build an e-commerce website for an international company (they sell incontinence products). I'm not specifically sure of the sales volume but estimate it to be around a maximum 500 transactions per day. Being an international site, it would obviously need to facilitate, shipping and payments from a number of countries. This company knows that I am a novice, and are not expecting a site launch for a year.
Starting a career as a Web Developer, I'm assuming jobs similar to this may arise time and time again so I am hoping to pick a framework that is accessible to my current skill level, but can also 'grow' with me as I develop.
I do not want to use 'template solutions', so obviously with some WordPress under my belt, that was the first place I turned, but reading the word 'glitchy' repeatedly in several forum threads has diminished my confidence.
Magento is the word I'm hearing everywhere, but it is mostly described as 'complex', while Shopify seems to be the 'quick fix'.
Can anyone recommend a framework that won't take me a decade to master, but is powerful, and reliable enough to stand the test of time? Do I just bite the bullet and surrender this year to learning Magento? Are these WordPress/Magento Hybrids any good?
Any advice would be much appreciated :)
Since you handle quite ok WP I would recommend this http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ . However you need to test it quite heavy to make sure nothing escapes.
Magento is one of the best (some say the best) and I suggest you might start reading some documentation about it since you want to make a career in this.
Good luck!
There are a number of open source e-commerce platforms out there. The most popular use PHP which is definitely a transferable skill (so you wouldn't be wasting your time).
This gives you a decent list of the best apps out there:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=3&category=eCommerce
My personal preference is http://www.oscmax.com which is about to release v2.5 of its platform. Built on osCommerce (the original open source e-commerce platform) code but with all the common modules installed for you but that is because I like the freedom to code the store how I like it not how the software company likes it!
However, if you are looking to get a job deploying e-commerce then Magento is probably the way forward since it is the most "commercial" of the open source platforms.
How can I build a regular website using drupal? which module should I use for that?
That's a pretty generic question. You should check out http://drupal.org/start and work through their Getting Started documentation and tutorials. After that, you should have an easier time here or on their forums getting more specific information.
According to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, Drupal is not for building regular websites but for building "ambitious digital experiences".
'Because Drupal evolved from a simple tool for hobbyists to a more powerful digital experience platform, many people believe that Drupal is now "for the enterprise". While I agree that Drupal is a great fit for the enterprise, I personally never loved that categorization. It's not just large organizations that use Drupal. Individuals, small startups, universities, museums and non-profits can be equally ambitious in what they'd like to accomplish and Drupal can be an incredible solution for them. Rather than using "for the enterprise", I thought "for ambitious digital experiences" was a good phrase to describe what people can build using Drupal. I say "digital experiences" because I don't want to confine this definition to traditional browser-based websites.'
At the 2017 DrupalCon Vienna, Buytaert stated: "Drupal is no longer for simple sites, but for sites with medium to high richness." Basically there are easier solutions for regular websites than maintaining Drupal securely in production on a web server.
Depending on how "regular" your "regular" website is, you might consider another platform.
All of Drupal's complexity and versatility, along with the time you spent learning them, would go to waste if you're just displaying a dozen or so static pages.
Is this is the case, Wordpress or Joomla might be better starting points.
My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.
Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.
I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).
I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.
So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.
I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.
I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.
That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.
Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.
There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.
Walter
Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".
Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.
WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.
Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.
There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.
If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!
Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.
Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
As a Developer, I find the tools at varying levels of being bug free. 6.0.1 was a pain, 6.2 is so much better. But once you develop with the tool, there is minimal effort to maintain it. I develop in hours what java developers take days to do. It is also easy to maintain as changes can be made very quickly. I cannot answer your question from the perspective of an architect or a Manager but i would agree with comments of some others here.
I am looking for some examples of innovative uses of social networking for a purely commercial environment. I can see the uses that Twitter might have for micro blogging for anything (application event logs springs to mind amongst other ideas).
Does anyone have any further examples or ideas they may want to share for ways that we can embed this kind of technology in our infrastructure.
For reference we are are an organisation which uses primarliy Microsoft technology (SharePoint, VS 2008, ASP.Net etc.).
Feel free to reference specific code examples, tutorials or just to make subjective comments on the concept of Social Networking for the business environment.
Sites currently being looked at include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Maps.
GREAT EXAMPLE here http://brandonhallawards.com/08/958-BLOGS-Sun.doc
by the way, are there any others?
I am also interested.
- Echo
With a little effort, you may use Captcha for Air Force recruiting instead of these old-fashioned color blind cards.
You can even do it online!
Don't forget the very common practice to use IM in corporate settings. It's often much easier than phone or mail, even if it is often not allowed by the IT security staff. Granted, it may not be truly innovative but the subversive factor counts, IMHO.