E-Commerce Frameworks?
July 28, 2007
Lately I have been thinking about why there are so many frameworks, yet if you are looking for anything do deal with e-commerce you are almost shit out of luck. Sure it is easy to interface with the API’s of payment gateways and couriers APIs. However, what I have seen is lacking is a uniform API under any of the frameworks I have looked at that address this fundamental and needed area.
In the past I had actually worked a bit on starting to create a payment and courier interface for a project I was working on utilizing the Zend Framework. However, due to deadlines I never had the time to fully complete nor create it to the specification I would have desired.
So here is my question, besides the really shitty shopping cart objects out there is there any true components for a framework that utilizes this functionality? I say shitty shopping cart objects because just about every single open source PHP shopping cart has some of the worst design aspects I have ever seen. Many times ending up in procedural code with limited objects that essentially just wrap existing functions into an object. You don’t see the standard object oriented design patterns being utilized. For instance a good payment gateway object design would utilize a factory pattern and a base abstract object that defines the functionality to be implemented and take the default behavior. The same goes with couriers.
Anyhow that is just my rant for the day. I hope to attempt to blog some more, however, with moving and being extremely busy on a work project I have not had time but to simply read what is going on in the PHP development atmosphere.
