php, asp.net, java

phouse

Hello All

I have put together a website Shopping cart with php and MySql. I chose the combination without any research and am now thinking is there a better combination that deals with a shopping cart situation i.e the concurrency issue of multiple shoppers accessing the database and keeping that database up to date real time, salvaging items that have been put in the cart and removed from the database but the session timed out without a purchase. Are there any other
issues i should consider?
I am especially interested in what the advantages/disadvantages asp.net, java and php have over each other in the implementation of a shopping cart
How would you approach a shopping cart and why? Any suggestions welcome.

Also i have put all the stock in one table just in case the customer wants to see all the stock, is there a way of diplaying different tables in the same set of results? Sorry to ask so many questions but i am new to these issues and have several shopping carts to do for different businesses and want to avoid pitfalls as well as know what the pros and cons of the different technologies are.

Thanks in anticipation.

Paul

mmonaco

MySQL and PHP are fine if they are what you're comfortable with. You can store functions in MySQL that will update whatever you'd like in the database. For currency concerns, your "transaction" table that includes the field price or something like that should have a currency_type field. Then when calculating the invoice use that data effectively.

To select from multiple tables:

SELECT DISTINCT a.id AS id, a.name as a_Name, b.name, b.field AS anything FROM table1 a, table2 b WHERE b.a_id=a.id

phouse

I am interested in what the advantages/disadvantages asp.net, java and php have over each other in general web design and (if anyone knows) the building of a shopping cart.
Any suggestions welcome.

Cheers

Paul

Jason_Batten

Disadvantages to Java are the person needs to support it and unless you give them a link I doubt they will find it. Java is the worst choice. *looks around for the java gools

Not sure about ASP.net vs PHP but security would be the main issue here.

MarkR

Presumably the OP is referring to server-side Java, i.e. JSP or Java Servlets (or some framework like Struts built upon one, the other or both).

For me one of the biggest issues is PHP's poor support for character encodings. Most of the PHP library assumes that a string is a byte array. mb_string can handle multibyte strings, but you need to know what encoding they're in and the rest of the PHP library still ignores the encoding.

Of course Java and .NET have unicode strings internally, which means that practically all APIs callable from Java or .NET need to be unicode aware (or at least, not totally naive, like most of PHP's)

Hopefully this will be addressed in PHP6.

Mark

Weedpacket

phouse wrote:
Hi

... advantages/disadvantages asp.net, java and php have over each other...

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=2126800&highlight=ASP+versus
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=2115600&highlight=ASP+versus
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10213147&highlight=ASP+versus
http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10243799&highlight=ASP+versus

hkucsis

NetNerd85 wrote:
Disadvantages to Java are the person needs to support it and unless you give them a link I doubt they will find it. Java is the worst choice. *looks around for the java gools

JSP/Servlet + Tomcat is simple to use but yet powerful enough to build this app. (shopping cart). For this kind of simple web app, I think the lanuguages/scripts of choice doesn't really matter. Just choose the one you are most comfortable with.