[ic] Shipping Survey

[Andrew Baerg]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:50 PM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke)
<racke at linuxia.de>wrote:

> On 10/16/2013 08:43 PM, William Carr wrote:
> >
> > On Oct 16, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Andrew Baerg <andrew.baerg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 2:14 AM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) <
> racke at linuxia.de> wrote:
> >>
> >> In general, it would make sense to have a generic shipping ecosystem for
> >> Perl + Interchange. But I'm sure there are a few things which can be
> discussed
> >> resp. enhanced in Shipment, e.g.:
> >>
> >> * use a better way to address the services instead of ->ups, ->...
> >>
> >> I had actually not intended the Shipment module to be used directly. I
> have to confess that this is my first module published to CPAN. I had asked
> for help to get it published and this was one of the things that someone
> else did for me. There are definitely some areas where I could use some
> mentorship from a Perl guru to steer me in the right direction. :)
> >>
> >> One of the main goals was to provide a consistent interface to the
> various shipping services so that you could do the following regardless of
> which service provider you were using:
> >>
> >> my $shipment = Shipment::XYZ->new(
> >>     from_address => Shipment::Address->new( ... ),
> >>     to_address => Shipment::Address->new( ... ),
> >>     packages => [ Shipment::Package->new( ... ), ],
> >>   );
> >>
> >> $shipment->ship('ground');
> >> $shipment->get_package(0)->label->save;
> > I'm glad this came up. I was just working on this today.
> >
> > What to we do when different carriers offer different services that will
> not fit into our predefined, generic services?
>
> For different services your Shipment::XYZ can implement a method on top of
> what Shipment offers, let's say
> fuel_surcharge, which is not implemented by Shipment::ABC.
>
> In the generic code calculating the shipment price:
>
> if ($shipment->can('fuel_surcharge')) {
>     $shipping_cost += $shipment->fuel_surcharge;
> }
>
> Just an example.
>

Yes, this has been implemented for example in Shipment::UPS where they
offer a carbon neutral option which can be set with

$shipment->carbon_neutral(1);


>
> >
> > I think in the example above we will have to assume each carrier offers
> essentially the same services which may not be the case.
> >
> > In interchange we usually do something like:
> >
> > UserTag ship_cost
> > blah, blah, bah
> >
> > shipping.asc:
> > f [ship_cost mode=GROUND_HOME_DELIVERY]
> >
> > Today I messed around with an approach like so:
> > shipping.asc:
> > f [ship_cost carrier=FexEx service=ground]
> >
> > In my first example we have to assume each carrier's service (or mode)
> has a unique name of pass in a carrier parameter.
> >
> > In the later example we'd have to limit the generic services to the once
> provided by all the carriers used.
> >
>
> Shipment should define standard parameters for the constructor,
> Shipment::DEF can have additional parameters.
>


The base class where standard parameters are is currently Shipment::Base

Andrew
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