3

Open source PHP shopping carts platform/framework occupy most top list. They are hot, and we want start quick. So, we are going to make decision between Magento and Opencart, PHP programmers would be happy to this end. While my Java programming colleges feel not so happy, they were selling Broadleaf commerce or JadaSite. But more online reading and discussion pushing us to this way. PHP shopping carts get more use and so tested more and they get support multiple shops and multiple vendors.

What will be Java's advantage in this open source field? Or should we believe Java can give decent infrastructure in long run?

Improve this question
0

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

Popularity ≠ Quality. Most people using a shopping cart won't be testing it properly. Of course, that's true for all languages. I advise that you audit all proposed cart solutions for security, paying particular attention to SQL Injection and XSS issues. (This is important because you've got code that's going to be fairly close to handling money, so it will be more exposed than most of your site in any case.)

As for advantages of PHP over Java or vice versa, it really depends what you've done your web tier in. There's a big advantage in any case with keeping the number of languages in use within any particular tier down, as it lets developers specialize across the whole tier. (It's nice to be able to do anything, but there's only 24 hours per day for Earth-bound folks.) Fitting in with what you're doing currently is more important than chasing whatever is “hot”, particularly for core competencies (like selling your products).

Improve this answer
1
  • Popularity may not equal quality, but they are correlated. People are less likely to use software with a reputation for security vulnerabilities. Black hats certainly test popular software more, and at any rate software quality doesn't depend on "most" people testing it properly, just a handful of those most knowledgeable. Inferior desktop software is often still popular because people need it to interoperate with others. Low quality shopping cart software is much more easily rejected because there are no such interoperability concerns.
    – Karl Bielefeldt
    May 14, 2011 at 8:40
0

My experience is that:

  • Dynamic web-based languages (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python) are easy to get started with and help you build something fast. This is the reason why these are popular in lots of start-ups to get going quickly.
  • Java based solutions take a bit longer to get up and running, but will give you a more robust, scalable and maintainable platform in the long run. This is the reason why Java is so popular in the "big application" space (Banks, Telecoms, Google etc.)

Obviously this is not always the case and there are a million exceptions, but in general I have found this to be true.

Improve this answer
0

Thanks, I appreciate the quality vs popularity thinks from Donal.

Can I give an improvement to my own question? It should not be my own question now, it looks so.

We just found a not so enjoyable results of the original trying. Java or even other language programmers can be good help in certain ways behind a PHP open source ecommerce framework. After jumping into the open source shopping-carts, they show more to us as frontend tools. More backend tasks will ask for decent programmers to show their skills, such as search across shops, accounting for multiple shops across servers. There are so much not has-to-be PHP for any PHP shopping-carts softwares. It's really frightening.

Improve this answer
1
  • If you sign in with the same OpenID here as you use on SO and associate your accounts, you will regain ownership of your question here and will be able to edit it to include this additional information.
    – Adam Lear ♦
    May 14, 2011 at 17:56

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.