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How to Develop an Online Shopping Cart (Part Three)

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Lawrence Cramer

Lawrence Cramer
www.cartweaver.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Example Application Setup and the Database
  3. Application.cfm
  4. The Home Page
  5. The Check Out Page
  6. The Process Order Page
  7. The Administration Page

This is part three of a three-part series on shopping carts. In my previous two articles, I discussed the theory and principles behind developing an e-commerce application. In this article, I will deconstruct the example application that I referred to in the previous two articles to show how I put some of the principles into practice. If you haven't already been through part one and part two of this article series, do so before completing part three. You can see a hosted version of the shopping cart covered in this part of the article series.

I built the example application in Macromedia ColdFusion using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, but the principles I cover apply to virtually all server platforms. I'm not going to spend a great deal of time on the specifics of every line of code in the shopping cart application, but I will review the major code blocks on each of the application pages. If you are new to ColdFusion and you don't understand parts of the code in the sample files, a good place to go for help is the built-in ColdFusion reference in Dreamweaver (Window > Reference). Some good places to start learning ColdFusion are the ColdFusion Developer Center, or one of the many ColdFusion books on the market. Again, this article isn't meant to be a ColdFusion how-to article as much as it is meant to show you the process of developing an e-commerce application.

Note: The example application in the download files is not meant to be a production-ready shopping cart and does not include the SSL security described in parts one and two of this article series.

Requirements

Dreamweaver MX 2004


ColdFusion MX (Optional for running the example application)


Tutorials and sample files:


Microsoft Access (Optional for viewing example application database)


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About the author

Lawrence's day job is web application development. He also develops Dreamweaver Extensions, helps out on the Macromedia forums, teaches at the local Community College, speaks at web development conferences around the country, and writes articles on web development and e-commerce. For fun, he takes motorcycle road trips and occasionally catches a fish or two with his wife of 25+ years. Lawrence has three children—two daughters and one son. Two are grown and one is still in school. You can find him at lawrence@cartweaver.com.