Java Cart About This Cart

In the spring of 2003, just for the heck of it, I began to write a shopping cart in java. After several months it became clear that a good cart would take at least a year to create. I decided to stop work on the cart and focus on projects with shorter time frames.

In the spring of 2004 I decided that if I wait until I have a full year to devote to the cart I'll never get around to it. Meanwhile, I have a nice start to a shopping cart on my hard drive, where it can't possibly do anyone any good.

So, I'll put it online for anyone to see, use, and criticize.

The start of a fully functional java servlet shopping cart design kit. It is meant as a framework for anyone wanting to create a cart. Even when it is finished it is not meant to be used right "out of the box", but as a solid start to a heavily customized e-commerce solution.

There are excellent e-commerce solutions that do work right out of the box, and I have a page devoted to discussing some of them.

A primary goal of the cart is to have the potential to handle sales, distribution, and inventory of any type of item that may or may not be charged for. This includes sales of various media (including pictures, video, and text), items with inventory or limited supply, items with various sizes and colors, groups of items, items with complex availability (perhaps by country), subscriptions, and more.

Note that when designing a shopping cart or ecommerce solution the actual "cart" is only the beginning of the system. Just to list a few things:

If you have items with inventory, you need a system to track changes to invetory from customer purchases, customer returns, spoilage, new inventory added, and reconcilliation between stored and actual inventory

If you have products distributed online such as media or software you need a system to allow paying customers to access their purchases, while preventing others access to it.

And, you need a system to track any information you may need to about your customers accounts, etc.

I'm an application programmer, not a security expert. If you plan to develop a fully functional e-commerce system, you should at least have an experienced e-commerce consultant evaluate your system, servers, etc before full deployment.

This cart is designed to use Java servlets and jsps running on a Apache Tomcat server.

This cart is shown using MySQL, but it should be able to work with any relational database.

This cart does not use Enterprise Java Beans. It does use a few Java Beans to cache information in the servlet context.

All java modules have been re-formatted to into my new screens, which means they are no more than 75 characters wide. If some of them look like I tried to go through all of these modules in a few hours and edit them down to size, it's because that's exactly what happened.