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On Mar 1 in the year of our Lord 2000, thus spake the JFRANCANO3@aol.com:
>PLUG members,
>I have a unique problem that maybe someone in PLUG could help me solve. I own
>a networking infrastructure company that is being forced into e-commerce by
>my largest customer. I need to be able to take orders and process credit card
>transactions all through the web. I sell roughly 3,000 different cables, let
>alone the 500 other related products. I am told that through CGI scripting I
>can achieve total e-commerce. I do not know the first thing about CGI
>scripting, let alone what OS it works on. If anyone has any
>expertise/experience in this field please contact me. This system would
>preferrably work on the Linux OS.
The basic premise of CGI scripting is that it can work on any platform;
it stands for "Common Gateway Interface." Emphasis on "Common." That
being said, a good intro to the sort of thing you want to do is called
"Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" by Philip Greenspun. The
full text of the book is available gratis at
http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/. This person also founded ArsDigita
(http://www.arsdigita.com/) who can do everything for you if you have a
(large) pile of cash, if you're not fond of programming. (Disclaimer:
I'm trying to convince Hugh to hire me. <g>) They have a GPL'd toolkit
available that glues AOLserver (which can serve at least 28,000
hits/second and is in late beta for an open source version, and
available gratis in a stable version at http://www.aolserver.com/) to
Oracle (which is definitely non-free, both speech and beer), although
I'm told that the ACS (ArsDigita Community System, their toolkit) has
been ported to PostgreSQL if you want a free (beer and speech) solution,
if you don't need the intranet modules (which I've been told have yet to
be ported, although most everything else has). The benefit of the way
they've got this set up is that Tcl (scripting language of choice on
AOLserver) is embedded into the server, so you don't have to do an
expensive (in terms of computing overhead) process fork each time a
request comes in for a dynamic page. The benefit of using dynamic pages
generated from a database and scripts, of course, is that you don't have
to manually update three dozen static HTML pages each time you add a
product, let alone change your product line, and you can let people
search the database rather than having to maintain another 3 dozen
"product categories" pages (you can just have simple scripts that pull
products in specific categories out of the database and serve them up to
the (potential) customer).
BTW, you wouldn't happen to have thumb screws for PC cases among those
500 other products, would you? I've been looking for them. For that
matter, you wouldn't happen to sell the cases themselves, would
you? Just shopping around right now.
HTH,
Bill
--
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought.
But World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- A. E.
Harry Browne for President: http://www.harrybrowne2000.com/
Stop abusive software patents! Start typing http://www.noamazon.com
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