[Zope] Is e-commerce feasible with Zope?

[Diego Dainese]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2000 12:46:33 -0500 "Kevin Dangoor"
<kid@kendermedia.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Diego Dainese" <xdsi@xddainese.unive.it>
> To: <zope@zope.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2000 8:51 AM
> Subject: [Zope] Is e-commerce feasible with Zope?
> 
> 
> > The script will add the product to a shopping basket; later the
> > customer can proceed to the checkout. Here she/he will be able to
> > create an account on our site for later shopping.
> >
> > What I need is:
> >
> > - A means to implement the basket; with Apache+PHP I would use a
> >   simple file containing a list of product codes, or an SQL table.
> >
> > - A means to set a cookie on the client browser and to associate the
> >   it with a basket; with Apache+PHP I would use a SQL relation
> >   cookie->basket, or I would put in relation the basket filename with
> >   the cookie.
> 
> I have implemented something like this for byproducts.com. I'm storing the
> carts in the ZODB. This is not desirable if your site is very busy, though,
> because there can be issues if you have lots of concurrent writes going on.
> (Note that, from what I've read in previous threads, I would have to have 5
> people create new shopping carts at the same instant in order for one of
> them to run into an error. That's a lot. When I said that the site would
> have to be very busy, I meant *very*.)
> 

But are the Digital Creations guys aware of this problem, and thinking
to a solution?

In the short term I don't foresee a lot of traffic on my site, and I
hope that in the long term the problem with ZODB will be fixed.

However there's another thing that concern me on the ZODB based
solution; from on the ZODB vs SQL HOWTO:

   "If the data is going to be frequently changing, then it's not a
   good idea to put it in the ZODB. Every time the data changes, a new
   record will be appended to the Data.fs file - this could become a
   problem very quickly."

Is this still true?

> There are two Zope products, FSSession and SQLSession which should handle
> these things quite easily for you.
> 

OK, I'm sure one of these will solve the problem.

> > - A means to store the products database; with Apache+PHP I would use
> >   a simple SQL DBMS.
> 
> You could store the products database in the ZODB or in a SQL DB. Which one
> you use will probably depend on what you want to do with it, and how updates
> are made to it. For example, if you were going to be doing something like
> reloading the entire DB every hour (not likely, but just in case you were),
> you would not want to use the ZODB with the FileSystem storage, because your
> Data.fs file will grow quickly and need frequent packing.
> 
> Zope makes it easy to go either way on this one.
> 

I don't think the data will change so often; probably ZODB is the
right solution for this.

> > - A means to store customer informations on the site; with Apache+PHP
> >   I would use another SQL table, with a relation one to many to store
> >   the (possibly) many customer's addresses.
> 
> Again, you can use SQL if you want. There's a whole bunch of work going on
> right now to create new User objects in Zope. These will make it possible to
> attach all sorts of things to users and will be a really nice
> abstraction.

I'm very interested in these new user objects: where can I find more
info on this subject?

> Personally, I prefer to work with the ZODB wherever possible. I just
> generally prefer objects to the relational model.
> 

I prefer it too when possible.

Another concern with ZODB is the max DB size: on Linux based system
with the ext2 file-system and the kernel patch, the max file size is 4
GB; since the Zope DB is stored into a single file (right?), this mean
that the max DB size is 4 GB.

The solution I had in mind to store customer's account is a folder
containing one instance of a custom ZClass to store general user
information and one ore more instances of another custom ZClass to
store address informations (do you known better solutions?).

But a quick test has revealed me that with this system, a user account
will take about 2 kByte; with a max DB size of 4 GB this lead to max
2.000.000 users; this is for sure a big number, but if you consider
the probable big number of dummy registrations, I think it's not
unreachable.

Is this analysis correct?

> > - I would let the site to be accessed both via https and http.
> 
> There was recently a ZServer version announced with support for SSL.
> Otherwise, I think people are just using Apache with fastcgi.
> 

Glad to hear this!

> > - The site must be easily internationalized, thus I must be able to
> >   replace all the text in the pages with a translated version; with
> >   Apache+PHP I would use an include file where to store the text
> >   messages as PHP constants.
> 
> There is a Zope Internationalization Project (ZIP), though I think that has
> focused on adding more internationalization to Zope's core. For your own
> apps, I would think there are a number of ways to implement this.
> Acquisition is your friend. You'll probably use acqusition to make life easy
> for you.
> 

OK; the solution I have in mind is to store the page's text into the
folder's proprieties, but I am wondering if there is a coolest
solution.

Thank you for the reply, bye

-- 
Diego   | To reply remove the `x' and swap the | Sorry for my
Dainese | words around the `@' in the address. | bad English.