[ic] Interchange Advice

Doug Alcorn interchange-users@lists.akopia.com
Mon Jun 25 10:29:01 2001


Sunil <sunil1911@yahoo.com> writes:

> The usual list of products is out there, however I need something
> rapid, pluggable, and of course stable.  This may sound like a usual
> laundry list of an application, however stability of few
> applications have yet to be desired.

IC is very mature.  I would be surprised if you had any stability
problems that were actually due to IC and not the installation or
custom configurtaions.  That said, quite a bit of the FAQ is about
installation problems.  I think the trick is to follow the
instructions closely.  Having Unix experience is a definite plus.

> What are your feelings towards Interchange in terms of development
> of a small site w/ a 100-250 product catalog?  How does the perl
> development compared to a jsp/java based architecture?

I think you might be a little frustrated in coming to IC.  The reason
is that jsp/java is _much_ more well defined than IC is.  The two are
very similar.  IC provides a daemon that actually processes requests
and generates the pages (as opposed to the actual cgi that generates
the pages).  However, there's an industry formed around jsp with lots
and lots of documentation written by many people.  IC is mainly only
known within a fairly small community by comparison.  There is only
one set of documentation written from one perspective.

Long term, IC is a pretty good solution.  However, coming up to speed
takes a bit (ironically this is especially true if you have
strong/structured development experience).  IC gives you a good
interface to handle many of the mundane aspects of e-comm.  Using this
framework you can do pretty much whatever you want.  It has its own
tag language.  This is nice for non-programmers, but doesn't really
leverage previous perl experience.  IC also has a mechanism for doing
ASP-like pages with perl.  This is mainly what I use.  I can do logic,
sql and what-not in the language I'm familiar with but still have
access to the API for the e-comm stuff.  Once I got a handle on this
development moves pretty quickly.

Standard disclaimers apply, YMMV, HIH, etc.
-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
 oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1  61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
 |_/  If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
      free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.