What is Digg?54 Comments
- jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Disclaimer: I use Rails in my dayjob.
Main problem with this is its still relatively difficult to get solid Rails hosting. The framework is still much better suited to roll-your-own types of projects.
You just don't see too many things released like this in the Rails world. People kind of doing their own things, that fit their exact needs. But certain apps like these aren't easily recreatable.
Still for all the hype about Rails getting things done fast...where are the open-source forums? The only one I'm aware of is the rather bland RForum. - Vallenwood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6As an experienced OSCommerce developer, I can say with a teeny bit of authority that this is a very clean-looking little package that so far doesn't do anything.
It would be extremely nice to see a new open-source shopping package; benpjohnson is right that OSC is getting long in the tooth and is hard to work with if you haven't put in a lot of study, but it's still the most comprehensive open source package around, and I was disappointed to see that this ROR package isn't even remotely a "rival." I was hoping it would be! Maybe it would help get OSC back in gear. (The add-on community is still active, but the core package, aside from some nice recent security patches, hasn't been developed for a while.)
It would be fun to play with, and it obviously has all the gradient-filled, round-edged modern design touches the up-to-date web 2.0 cultmembers demand, but like I said, so far it doesn't really do anything. Keep your heads screwed on, people; this is supposed to be digg, where the smart people go to party. - panique, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Rudimentary is the adjective that comes to mind for me. I mean seriously, I click "Buy Now", because there is no "Add to Basket" button, and suddenly I'm in the checkout lane. Do these guys know the first thing about retail? Here's a hint, you always create some obstacles to the exit to try to attract customer attention to other wares you have to sell.
- jairhart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How can this be an awesome shopping cart where I can't edit the qualities of items? I can only add one, or delete everything and start over. I hope it gets better, but it's not there yet.
- wrinkles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Dreamhost offers Rails hosting.
- bloodroot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I can't believe ROR has so much hype that software of this caliber can make it to the front page of digg.
I took a look around the code and it's not bad, but nothing to write home about.
The site using this engine is worth a few laughs though
http://www.genselect.com/ - arudgick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3looks like a sound initial offering. i'm anxious to see paypal support included.
- theantidote, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3These would work if you're selling like 1 item. There's no categories for shopping or anything to help the user, it's all just a mess when you get to the shop, not even a search.
- esconsult1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The holy grail of a shopping cart in any language, is to add something to the cart using AJAX. That way, you don't lose the stream of buying. I still have not seen a decent implementation of this anywhere.
A good first effort, but this is just getting diggs because it uses Rails, not because its better than the ones that it purports to compete with. - hangtown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm being totally honest here - I don't see anything "bangin" about the admin interface. It's actually quite spartan with little configurability.
- Chongo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I setup an OSC site for a start-up company. I have NEVER come across so much cluttered code in my life. I understand that some of it is a must, but you should see how truely hard it is to edit when your client wants to completly customize the look (and templates don't do the complete job).
anyways, still on 2.2 (supposed to be on 3 along time ago).
I'm going to take a look at this and see how customizable it is. hopefully they took into account that people don't like their eCommerce sites to look like complete hell - Chewie67, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Wow. How did an ugly ecommerce app with minimal features make it on the main page of Digg?
Oh yeah, they used the "Ruby on Rails" buzzword.
Yawn. No digg. - dasil003, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3ZenCart is a beast too, and don't fool yourself.
- dasil003, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@clifyt
You're right about the first part. AJAX is just a means to an end. If you know what you're doing (and Rails really helps with this), you can structure your back end to support both AJAX and pure HTML operation by setting up controllers that do the same thing either with or without javascript.
But then you go on to say, "RoR is all based around the least amount of work anyone needs to do and its almost like point and click programming where folks just don't need to know how to think because all the methods are there for designing visually appealing sites (but little else)."
RoR has nothing to do with how a website looks. By default you just write HTML templates with embedded ruby (much like php). You can also use other templating engines, but either way you supply the design. Perhaps you're thinking of scaffolding, but that's such a tangential addon to Rails that it's not even really worthy of discussion.
You are right that Rails makes the easy stuff easy. But you are wrong to say that it's designed for the easy stuff, or so "folks don't need to know how to think". No, just like any good framework it's designed to manage complexity and if you are a serious web programmer it does so admirably. - chenshack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2the book "agile web development with rails" http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index.html covers a shopping cart from start to finish. this is the de facto ruby training book and takes a developer step by step through the process.
anyone can take a tutorial and make it a bit prettier. - gmailgeoff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There's a caveat on the demo site that starts: "Dont pay any attention to the customer facing design. The admin is where the real magic happens." (or close enough to that to quote it)
That's not, and shouldn't be reassuring if we're talking about a SHOPPING CART. Admins don't make a shopping cart worth using - the customers purchases do! If it's ***** on the front end, why even bother with the back end? The answer is DON'T bother with either.
It's a good start, but it's not production ready unless by production you mean, "welcome to 1995 (but on rails), buy something purely for the novelty."
No digg. - joshpeek, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Plus TextDrive
http://textdrive.com/ - x0923, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i just tried to buy a rub down from ponch, got a application error doah
demo failed - chubbymidget, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Would be nice to see a quality product that isn't based on OSC's convoluted and old (Is OSC even off 2.2 yet?) design.
- tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you are looking for an article on processing credit cards with Ruby on Rails this one (just published) is probably the best. The tutorial uses Active Merchant, Apache, SSL and Authorize.net.
Processing Credit Cards with Ruby on Rails
http://www.omninerd.com/2007/01/23/articles/66 - codyfauser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You could check out the Opinion Forum System at http://home.leetsoft.com/opinion
- wrinkles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1coral cache:
http://www.subimage.com.nyud.net:8080/sublog/openSourceRubyOnRailsShoppingCart - francois, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You're right, and the guys from script.aculo.us showed a long time ago how to make a drag and drop shopping cart in AJAX. They also uses RoR, but for what it's best at - not like this demo which looks so 1990s...
- spyres, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Lame.
- clifyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"The holy grail of a shopping cart in any language, is to add something to the cart using AJAX."
No its not, its to get the customer to buy more. AJAX has nothing to do with it.
It might be one of the paths to this end result, but that isn't the grail.
For instance, I spent a good deal of time restructuring OSC so that I could do just this -- and it wasn't too hard -- but the problem is in the design patterns. What do you do when you find out your customers are using a marginalized browser with little javascript support and no DOM?
That's the whole problem with this whole AJAX / RoR idea -- it expects everyone to be using 100% standards based browsers -- and be 100% motor / visual abled. Anyone needing anything special in the way or screen readers or otherwise are left out. Amazon has the manpower to deal with this sort of thing...I know in the past, I've been able to buy from there with javascript turned off. RoR is all based around the least amount of work anyone needs to do and its almost like point and click programming where folks just don't need to know how to think because all the methods are there for designing visually appealing sites (but little else).
Not that I don't like the language -- its the just opposite end of the whole PHP Encourages Security Holes argument that people that have an agenda throw out -- in PHP's case, it encourages fast unstructured programming over real planning. RoR / AJAX encourages a structured approach based around simplistic database queries focused solely on a visually effective user experience. Both ignore HUGE areas that they are lacking. And both arguments are moot if you have someone that knows what they are doing. - cpawl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Maybe good for a kid selling stickers to his five friends but hardly a robust ecommerce solution.
OSC is a beast - ZenCart baby. - handeyman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://jymweb.com hosts my site, which has rails
- cynic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Anyone wondering about enhancement...
http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/wiki/ThoughtsBehindSubstruct - benpjohnson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This has a long way to go to equal Oscommerce but its nice to see some efforts made in this area. The Oscommerce code is horrible to work with and extending it can be a nightmare. The development of Oscommerce seems to be stalled (or just real slow at the moment).
This project could really score with a nice clean component based approach to facilitate easy development of extensions and effort to establish a community around it.
I think developing it in ruby may have been a mistake as jesusphreak points out. Not only does it currently lack the hosting but also the coders to really extend the project. - allenu, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Is it hosted using WEBrick? It seems to be inaccessible.
- DaBigWorm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Long time OSC user...I am interested to see how this stacks up!
- cybernetic798, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4How does something so minor make front page on Digg...this is seriously ridiuclous. Is it just because of RoR? I mean there are SO MANY scripts for all sorts of things in other languages as well but you don't see them making front page, so why should this? LAME.
- ericpp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2... but it's RoR so it *must* be superior :X
- luciddesign, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Even though they do purport to be top-of-the-line, so to speak, when the system is in its infancy and lacking features, it does look like it's got great potential and like something that will come in very useful for many people.
It does seem a fair comment that, with RoR, it is more likely developers will pull together various modules and plugin and develop their owns systems from the ground up but I think this project should be given more credit than it's had and not bashed simply because it's getting a lot of hype purely for being created with RoR.
Let's face it, there might be a lot of e-commerce systems out there but they are all bloated and ugly and lacking in elegance. If someone can prove me wrong, please do, I've been searching and searching for a nice, simple, elegant system for a long time.
... just my two cent's worth.... - Gustave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The whole idea of Rails Engines themselves seems completely irreverent and unsuited for Rails. I've tried a couple for things like authentication, and I've found the much, much simpler plugins like acts_as_authenticated to be a lot easier to actually use, rather than the monolithic solutions pre-packaged systems allow.
That's where I personally see the community going: small, modularized components that add a very specific functionality, such as FedEx tracking, pay services integration, or other acts_as plugins, for instance. I really hope generators win out in the end--it's what the folks at 37 Signals envisioned. - ericdfields, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0but how secure is this? i tested it and got to the end (before it realized my bunk information was such), and the whole time i never got indication of security.
how hard would it be to implement this? its not something i've had to deal w/ yet in my web development career.... - sumsmug, on 05/30/2008, -0/+0Rails mostly used by developers (like myself) to rol their own, but this provides a nice base to work from. I have to a simple store and might try starting from this as a base then hack away until I get what I need.
- nzadrozny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0As to forums, http://beast.caboo.se/ is a very nice, lightweight open-source forum built on Rails.
- cynic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just a heads up - v0.61 has been released that includes some nice features like product categorization and an AJAX'd shopping cart.
If you've checked it out before, or are new to Substruct give it a look.
http://dev.subimage.com/projects/substruct/ - signal15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Rforum looks bland, however, you can fully customize it by changing the CSS. I have a forum that runs PHPBB now, and I'm sick of dealing with all of the security issues. I'm going to convert to RForum as soon as I can get around to making it look better.
- pokerking, on 11/19/2007, -0/+0i don't see comments
- OutsideofDreams, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Agreed, I can only remove all the items at once. Inability to edit the cart directly makes this a bit of a flop.
- nonchallant0819, on 03/30/2008, -0/+0This is a great story... found this one through http://www.google.com
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http://www.TopNotchCarpentry.com - boxabirds, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0RoR & Substruct will grow like Java did even despite their attempts to prevent it. Anyone remember what the selling points of Java were back in 1996? Lightweight, uncluttered, and as a result, easy to learn and easy to get started on. See a pattern here? Both Substruct and RoR authors say they're not going to grow and get more complex -- but at the same time, you have an enthusiastic community falling over themselves to add all the bits they want. It'll be interesting to see how RoR and milestone products like Substruct evolve over the coming years -- what's in place to prevent this feature creep? Is 'Enterprise RoR' an inevitability? How can it be avoided? We have Enterprise PHP now. What about Substruct skinning, ? The author says 'no shopping carts' but I bet your bottom dollar it'll have them inside 6 months. And Rails Engines -- a 'new' concept already, superceding Generators... well aren't they just akin to a Java WAR? Are we not just reinventing the wheel again?
Don't get me wrong -- I think RoR has an interesting combination of Java and PHP success elements (OO, and super productiv rapid community, respectively). - Teh_Psyren, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1404 Diggs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111
- cochise22, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Oh man I have been waiting for something like this.
- cynic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Damn sorry for the slowness everyone! The site is running Trac on Apache/FastCGI and seems to be buckling under the load.
I'm looking into ways to speed it up right now...guess I've been diggdotted? - chdcrtss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0http://www.3floors.com has rails hosting for real cheap. It's a small group of guys that love tech. Just send em an email. Also http://www.path-seeker.com has pretty cheap rails hosting too.
- cochise22, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Hurry! ;)
- RailsAddict, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Are you guys hiring and in the Dallas, TX area?
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