Web store software

Is anyone familiar with website software (shopping cart required) that
is either mv based or designed to interface well with mv? The
particular flavor the inventory is in is mvBase 1.3

Thanks

Hi George,

Is there any ability to move from mvBase to another MultiValue tool,
like OpenInsight?

Here at Sprezzatura we have client with a television shopping channel
site (www.tvsn.com.au) that is using our software to process millions
of database transactions every day and takes tens of thousands of
dollars worth of business every hour. It's load balanced for speed
and it is also super robust - http://www.revsoft.co.uk/ustvsn.htm.

We also have another client running a Sprezzatura written site (http://
www.mpr.co.uk) which processes credit card transactions and then
enable users to query the full database.

These are just two internet sites available to anyone.

I will be happy to discuss your requirements offline, if you could
entertain a move to Revelation’s OpenInsight.

Good luck with whatever you decide and whichever direction you take.

Martyn.

George Smith wrote:

>Is anyone familiar with website software (shopping cart required) that
>is either mv based or designed to interface well with mv? The
>particular flavor the inventory is in is mvBase 1.3
>
>Thanks

I might get shot for this by our colleagues who sell apps but...

I get questions on this topic from a lot of prospects looking for
connectivity, so I'll expand on the topic a little.

There is a lot of FLOSS out there for doing shopping carts, doing
eCommerce, and the like. Most of these are written in PHP, some in
..NET and other stacks. All of the more popular ones have some
interface for importing data like products, shipping data, etc - the
sort of stuff you need to move back and forth from MV. And if they
don't have a standard interface, then they all allow for add-in
modules where you can code an interface for MV. It's not that tough.

You will not find a LAMP package that is completely DBMS agnostic to
allow you to run MV as transparently as a relational database like
MySQL, Postgres, or Sql Server. While the more modern packages have a
special Data Access/Abstraction Layer (DAL) there is almost always
some SQL query elements sprinkled in the packages themselves or in
add-on modules.

So, as a recommendation, osCommerce is very popular and an interface
can be made from there to move data to/from your local or remote MV
app. Many websites are run in shared hosts that cannot support an MV
DBMS directly. In this case a web service will connect to the "home
office" MV environment. If the site needs better performance or it's
certain to get a lot of traffic then you'll want to bring the website
in-house or move the relevant part of the app off-site into a
dedicated or private server. The cost for this is anywhere from $15
to $700/month depending on your requirements.


If you'd like assistance with this, we have people who have experience
with both data transfer from LAMP/FLOSS packages as described, and
with osCommerce specifically. In fact we're going to be writing some
of this ourselves for a completely non-MV, all LAMP initiative - I
welcome an opportunity to do this for a client.


HTH
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com

On Aug 20, 12:44*pm, George Smith wrote:
> Is anyone familiar with website software (shopping cart required) that
> is either mv based or designed to interface well with mv? *The
> particular flavor the inventory is in is mvBase 1.3
>
> Thanks

We've been using mv://e-Store from Eagle Rock IS (http://www.eaglerock-
is.com/) for years. Totally MV based. Ours is linked real-time into
for finished goods inventroy - we made some minor tweaks to make it
customer based.

Dave Gordon

Thanks to all for the web store suggestions. I have passed them along
to the client (who is reasonably mv fluent.)

For anyone interested, I've been evaluating shopping carts and have
come to the following conclusions:

- osCommerce is very popular but old, not well maintained, and a real
pain to administer in terms of add-ons. I've tried it and found it to
be lacking in long-term appeal.
- Zen-Cart is based on osCommerce, has a much "better" community for
various reasons, better developer support (more developers and a
planned roadmap), and is easier to maintain. Most ZC sites are
converts from osCommerce. I've tried it and have a much better
impression than osC.
- Magento is a new commercial offering, seemingly based on osC (aren't
they all?) but word everywhere is that they're rapidly moving up in
this arena. I haven't tried it yet, and while the UI looks really
impressive I'm concerned with the more proprietary nature of the
offering, and thus extensibility. The software is open source like
the others but it looks like module development is kept closer to home
and integration with the core will be difficult if a module isn't
sanctioned by the owners. This remains to be seen. Coding with
Magento should be much better over the long run because it's based on
the Zend framework while the other offerings are less structured.

Modern CMS environments are more pluggable via an API, whereas the
older ones require patches and mods to the core code. I also work
with Drupal which is extremely pluggable in this respect. The Magento
developers are working on an API to make the platform more capable of
exchanging data with other environments (like MV) where the other
environments will require custom mods written more directly into the
core.

So if you're looking for a common OSS shopping cart, I'd suggest
ZenCart, but keep your eye on Magento as well.

Interestingly, the feature set for a lot of these is very similar.
It's very limited to the common features that people expect, mostly
related to the UI, and not very business-oriented. The ZenCart
community is made up of more business-oriented developers than
osCommerce so more of the mods are business rules vs UI gadgets that
add new fields to the screen. The reason why this is interesting is
that all of these products seem to pale in functionality compared to
even the most simple MV business application. The more I look at
these shopping cart apps the more I want to choke - CUI-based MV apps
may be ugly and unusable in the modern sense, but anyone who can put a
good "shopping cart" front-end on a full-featured MV app could make a
killing by renting it for use in a Service Oriented Architecture.

If people learned MV BASIC rather than PHP for maintaining business
rules we would see an explosion of new mods and tweaks for MV apps
just like any common OSS app. The problem is inertia - the world is
already using PHP, PHP is simply the tool to use in the eyes of most
of these people, and using anything that's not LAMP simply doesn't fit
the mold. MV also doesn't fit the LAMP model well. It's not open
source, not hosted at typical shared hosts, and the business rules are
in the engine rather than in code on the web server. All of this
makes me think there could be a small opening for QM with Coyote,
hosted at EasyCo where you get root access to Linux to maintain
everything. I can elaborate on this if required.

The rest of the world is passing us by because we're using the wrong
tools - as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Our market
position has nothing to do with the quality. If we can look more like
the other stuff that's out there, and provide the same sort of
ubiquitous access as LAMP, we might be able to rejuvinate some segment
of this market.

It's something to think about folks.

Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com