RoR on-line store or OSCommerce?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi Jose,

Not a direct answer to your question, but here are two resources to check out: I have both these books and they are both good value !

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/rails-ecommerce http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10178

Both available as e-books, so outlay is minimal !

HTH - Dave Porter

2

or use an existing rails ecommerce host, like http://shopify.com/ ?

3

Oscommerce is a terrible mess of spaghetti code. It’s architecture violates most of the principles of software design we’re so eagerly pursuing in rails.

Business logic mixed right into the HTML. (a very PHP-centric design)

No unit tests. A very rigid page flow that’s a headache to alter.

You may notice that it’s been years since oscommerce’s last release: 2.2.

On the other hand, if you want something that works out of the box, don’t intend to touch the code, and don’t mind asking your customers to click through some slightly annoying forms, have a look at oscommerce.

4

My experience is that if you plan to modify anything (even just the look/feel) it’s cheaper in the long run to make if from scratch. Every time we’ve tried to “save time” by using something like OSCommerce it’s ended up costing us more in time spent than if we had just built it from scratch.

One alternative might be shopify, as has been mentioned. I’ve never done a production site using it, but I’ve played around with it quite a bit. Looks like it’s super easy to design themes for it, and it’s very feature rich.

Good luck!