[Zope] ZCommerce solution available soon

[Dyon Balding]

I am working for a small company developing a general ECommerce solution
in Zope at the moment.  We have two full time programmers working on it
currently, and a graphic designer for the later stages.  We are
developing the Catalogue/Cart system as an open source front end for a
complete realtime on-line purchasing system specifically designed for
Australian businesses.

In terms of implementation, we are developing it completely as a Zope
Python Product.  All purchaseable products are stored in the ZODB, as
a hierachy of Products (the items) in Categories (folders).  Of course
you can have Categories within Categories.  Each Category defines what
attributes it's Products can have, in a method similar to the property
sheets of ZClasses.  It also allows for templates for the different
views.  I won't go into too much detail of the code, as 
we are intending to release it towards the end of the week.

We are endeavouring to make the system completely within Zope, with no
external SQL database.  This makes it much easier to install the system
regardless of platform, and without needing any extra skills.  Our 
company also provides Zope hosting, but we want to make our product
useable enough that anyone can install it.  To implement a 'shopping
cart' system, our cookies currently contain the product IDs, with no
session information stored in our database.

Our system will be able to be set up in a stand-alone mode in which case
it will forward the orders to the merchant, or at a later stage in a
realtime mode.  In this latter case, it will be connected through our
proprietry realtime on-line purchasing system.

We were intending to keep the system under wraps until we had a first
version to release, but with the increased interest in ZCommerce
applications recently we thought we should jump on the bandwagon and
tell everyone what we're up to.

Look for a release by the end of the week, and hopefully this will
inspire some more ZCommerce related discussion.

-d

-- 
                            Dyon Balding, email: dyon@adroitnet.com.au
                           work: +613 98888522, mobile: +61 0414992604
                                             Adroit Internet Solutions