[mv] Re: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Mike Heins <mikeh@minivend.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Mike Heins <mikeh@minivend.com>     ******

> > To me, a persons success (or frusturation) with minivend depends LARGELY on
> > their ability to extend it with Perl. 
> 
> Maybe thats the essence of this discussion. Someone who is not used to
> Perl will get frustrated except he wants to learn MV inside (which you
> described as the the minivend learning curve).

Minivend has a steep and definite learning curve, no doubt. I am hoping
as more and more people move to MV 4 this will decrease, but so be it. I
have done the best I could so far.

To be sure, you can program your own cart in PHP, Tcl, or whatever you
wish.  And it can do many of the things that Minivend does, perhaps better
and faster.  I know quite a few people have seriously tried Minivend and
left it for greener pastures. More than one have come back to it after
a while.

I do submit, though, that the main value of Minivend is in covering the
border conditions. It has been in use for 4+ years, has taken millions
of orders, and we have learned one or two things about shopping carts
in the process. (The we is all of you and me; I learned much of what I
have put into MV from the hard experience of the user base.)

It is easy to write a shopping cart that works for one user on one
browser.  It is not quite so easy to write one that works well for most
users and browsers.

There was a recent InfoWorld article docuemnting the troubles that await
the shopping cart writer:

    http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/fixup.pl?story=/articles/ic/xml/00/03/07/000307icfail.xml&dctag=icommerce

I submit that designing a shop around a well-tested ecommerce solution, be
it MV or another, makes stories like that less likely.

The biggest conundrum I face is making things simple....and powerful
at the same time. Sometimes those are at odds. I have talked to many
people that have used commercial shopping carts that are purportedly 
easy to use, and the reports I get are that they work fine as long as
your problem fits in their problem space. Once you go outside of that
space and want more, it becomes much harder to use them.

Though I originally intended the demo to be just that, a demo, designed
to illustrate MV's features, it has become more than that. There has
been some standardization of fields and processes for transactions
on checkout. The next big challenge for MV, which is being met,
will be to make a store-oriented rather than a development-oriented
admin interface. By this time next year, I expect to see a world-class
store-oriented admin interface on top of Minivend. And a much better
documentation set.

Any further contributions on this topic that are pointed at comparing
Minivend and PHP or other technologies are welcome. Criticism of Minivend
is always welcome -- facts and examples are especially appreciated. 8-)

Best,
Mike
-- 
Internet Robotics, 131 Willow Lane, Floor 2, Oxford, OH  45056
phone +1.513.523.7621 fax 7501 <mikeh@minivend.com>

Any man who is under 30, and is not liberal, has not heart; and any man
who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has not brains.
 -- Winston Churchill
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