[support] Seeking Advice on Integrating drupal

[Christopher M. Jones]

Very helpful. Thank you. In view of the fact that precisely what we're
looking to avoid is the cost of creating a new engine, what about other
solutions? We like Drupal. And if the tweaks we need were simple we'd
love to contribute. But if that's just not realistic, then what about
eCommerce? I steered clear of it, because reviews of it seemed a bit
luke warm. And then there's Zen Cart, which I can't really get a good
feeling for, since they seem to have removed their documentation so you
have to buy their book. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence. 

Suggestions?


On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 10:51 +0200, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2008 18:06:21 -0400
> "Christopher M. Jones" <cjones at partialflow.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > The product catalog should remain fairly stable. It's mainly stock
> > (price, availability, location) that needs to come from the MSSQL
> > db. Prices and availability are managed on site using a custom VB
> > app that talks to the MSSQL server. Quantities, pricing, and
> > locations are constantly changing and need to be accurate to the
> > second. 
> 
> That looks tricky and that's exactly why I decided to put the
> business logic into the DB.
> Especially if you want to be sure that the order is going to be
> closed with quantities accurate to the second, you'll need some
> locking mechanism across 2 DB.
> Then if your DB are in different places latency problem won't make
> keeping the thing running easier.
> 
> > Another tricky piece is going to be a 'sell cart' in addition to
> > the traditional 'buy cart'. I foresee this requiring some hacking.
> > Does anyone have initial thoughts on this?
> 
> It start to look as if you're going to implement your own e-commerce
> engine.
> In Ubercart products are nodes. That means they "should" reside in
> Drupal DB. If you need "accurate to the second" quantities you'll
> have to see how Ubercart closes the order and update the inventory.
> Its design may not be suited for "accurate to the second" inventory
> management or may just be hard to be converted to a multi DB system.
> 
> One thing is "on demand" check of inventory status, another is
> closing an order coherently... or you may rethink your constraint
> and specification.
> 
> The core of Ubercart cart "workflow" is actually workflow-ng module
> that doesn't look to use any lock on the DB, nor transactions, making
> it pretty hard to transform a basket into an order, saving the
> correct inventory quantities and updating them with an accuracy "to
> the second".
> 
> Ubercart and workflow-ng are pretty impressive pieces of software...
> and may save you hundreds hours of programming if you're really not
> that concerned of "accurate to the second" quantities, pricing...
> and the probability and cost of getting into troubles is acceptable.
> Consider that the probability of getting into troubles is going to
> increase if you'll use 2 DB.
> 
> -- 
> Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
> http://www.webthatworks.it
>