E-Commerce Made Easy
Whether you work for a large Fortune 500 company or a small start-up, chances are that most of your application engineers are embroiled in the support and maintenance of your online store.
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
Whether you work for a large Fortune 500 company or a small start-up, chances are that most of your application engineers are embroiled in the support and maintenance of your online store.
And no wonder.
Given the complexity of most e-commerce deployments — mixes of hefty portions of business logic, hardware, and software — it’s rare to find a company not struggling with heady infrastructure issues such as reliability, performance, accuracy, and cost.
But as in other areas, open source can provide some much-needed relief. Based on LAMP — the combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and a scripting language such as Perl, PHP, or Python — a number of open source solutions can bootstrap, augment, or even substantially replace your own e-commerce efforts.
In this month’s “LAMP Post,” let’s explore osCommerce, a freely available and robust e-commerce solution. Freed from reinventing the storefront and shopping cart (and other features described in the sidebar “A La Cart”), you can focus on the unique aspects of your business.
