Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

The topic at hand is Oracle buying one dual license open source company after another. This is getting a lot of people worried. Of course it also got me thinking.

Dual licensing is a business model associated with companies distributing their code under two very different licenses. However the same code is also provided through some open source license, usually one of the so called reciprocal licenses (GPL and friends).

That system is pretty nice on many levels. Everybody gets the code with the license they prefer. The dual licensing company benefits through a cheap open source style distribution model. However they can still make money with selling licenses which is a very lucrative business model, while they can also make money through support.

He continues, mentioning some of the serious flaws with this dual license model, including the inability for a company, at any time, to move to a more closed-source method of development. He even mentions a situation where a project could loose all developers.

And, in his words: So are we up for the challenge if we are faced with such an exodus? ]]> Thu, 16 Feb 2006 06:51:02 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4574 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4574 CyberDummy's blog today, there's a quick post that points to a handy script over on the script.aculo.us library - a drag-and-drop shopping cart.

Just discovered the the excellent script.aculo.us drag and drop shopping cart. It is implemented with the script.aculo.us javascript library and ruby on rails. It is a perfect fit for a project I am working on but I needed a PHP version here is the rough first draft with source code.

I can definitely see something like this being the next step in ecommerce sites. No more hitting "Add to Cart" and waiting for the page to refresh, view the cart, then hit "Continue Shopping". Simply drag it in and it pops right up...]]> Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:30:44 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4413 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4413 AjaxDeveloper.org today, there's a new pointer to a blog post from Patrick on the creation of a Simple AJAX/PHP Shopping Cart.

I recently read an article from John Wiseman on creating a MySQL connection with AJAX (article link). Being a newcomer to the AJAX world I've found many tutorials and code libraries to be rather bloated and presumptious. John's article however was right on target and really got me going in the write direction to start thinking about AJAX and how it should work.

Given that article I started tinkering around and wound up creating a simple shopping cart application for a client. Below is a scaled down version of said application that hopefully can help you along in your AJAX travels.

There's plenty of code here to get you started, including the database structure, all availible for download. He doesn't explain much of it, but he does show where the Ajax is used - adding/removing/etc products from the shopping cart...]]> Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:58:17 -0600