PHP and E-Commerce

Have any of you worked on ecommerce projects using PHP and mYSQL as the main backend?

Do you know of any big name ebusinesses that use PHP?

Compared to other lanugues, how does PHP compare in terms of scripting languages(ex: ease of use, scalability, etc) in the ecommerce field?

I ask b/c im starting a startup dot com and im very profficient with php and feel very comfortable with it. But i dont know many ecommerce businesses that use it.

I just want your views on my issue b/c i assume that everyone here has much more experience and are much more wiser than i am.

See your other thread Check out phpshop. Yahoo use PHP, and that is one of the largest sites in the world.

Check out this thread for a general comparison of PHP with Java:

http://forums.devshed.com/showthrea...&threadid=45018

I haven't done any actualy work with ecommerce, so I can't comment specifically.

I have done several e-commerce projects with PHP. E-Commerce is really not the most complex area of web-based programming, so I would say any decent web scripting language can handle it just fine. (except for the platforms with obvious security problems).

But, PHP compares very well to the other scripting environments when it comes to performance, and actually has many very nice additional features and extensions for E-commerce:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pfpro.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mcve.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.cybercash.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.ccvs.php

Also, you might want to check out www.trustcommerce.com as a payment gateway, because they have a complete PHP API, as well as Perl, and several other languages.

There are also lots of nice mini-scripts for PHP to solve certain aspects of e-commerce, such as postage calculators, currency exchange, etc...

The only potential downside to PHP for E-Commerce I can see is that there still are not that many complete enterprise-level e-commerce packages out there for PHP. (OSCommerce is probably the most polished offering right now.) Of course, this is not a downside if you intend to create your own e-commerce system.

Well that gets my vote, awesome

As long as they've fixed the bug below. . And there's no documentation for the stable release.

http://www.opennet.ru/base/cgi/1024418282_253.txt.html

I've posted in the forums, let's see what happens.

Also, the core team seems to beat up on people in the forums. . .not very professional. Still, it may be nice (700 store, supposedly.)

Ah, yes, the old injection vulnerability. I've seen this in quite a few PHP apps. This is the biggest problem with widely-distributed open source packages. (although I normally detest the whole "security through obscurity" approach, it does make some of these things less troublesome)

I have never used OSCommerce, but it shows my point: so far, I have not been very impressed by the available e-commerce packages for PHP.

This is why I did my own custom implementations for the projects I worked on. But, I think it would be great if the PHP community could develop a true enterprise-level e-commerce solution, along the lines of InterShop or Kurant.

But for the moment, I will have to say the best available open-source package is probably InterChange , which uses Perl. It was owned by Akopia, and then bought by RedHat, but then has been dumped by RedHat, so it is now a purely open source project. (for better or worse ).

So, for the moment, I would have to say that all the right pieces exist for good PHP e-commerce implementation, but so far no one has really put them all together into a truly unified, robust package.