Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

What to do, roll your own ecommerce web app, buy something or use existing open source tools? Hmmmm. I dont know the "best" answer to this one, but here is an overview of two popular open source products and you know better than to buy something when you can get it for free anyway. As for your own code, well thats a personal decision but at least consider the options. If any ToTSP subscribers have any input on this topic or have tried these products then please relate your experiences. A future comprehensive review is planned, but for now this is the quick overview.OpenSales is just that, a free and open source ecommerce solution. This is a ood thing. OpenSales runs on many platforms and works with many databases, but basically it makes your Linux-Apache-MySQL box into a Perl driven eCommerce powerhouse, using a browser based GUI. Good stuff.This is an enormouse market for this type of product in these the early days on the ecommerce frontier. And of course OpenSales offers consulting on all of their products, but documentation and source are also available for free (consulting company of your own, supporting various os software products, anybody getting that idea too?) Anyway with tools pre-designed for Content, Statistics, Orders, Vendors, Inventory, Search, Customer Service and the like, again, why not use it? Zope is another open source web development platform. Zope is not strictly ecommerce foucused, but can do just about anything (apparently) and is an overal IDE for web apps. Zope runs on a variety of platform and works with many databases as well. Zope has all kinds of tools inculding object management, user management, search and more.Zope is a big player and has some clear advantages such as being written and extensible in Python and being a non-commerical open source initiative (better most of the time, motivators are quality and pride, not always profit.) Python is in my humble opinion an advantage over Perl (and have you seen JPython, it runs on anything Java, all yout Python scripts or modules will fly on anything Java, not to mention almost any platform natively anyway, cool, sorry got on a tangent.) Zope is a little ambiguous as to exactly what it does on the site, but it seems to claim that it can match all of the OpenSales features and then some. I have been working on my own "home grown" PHP and MySQL shopping cart system for several sites. And I do prefer PHP over Perl, but Python is all good too. If someone has already done the grunt work, and it works well, why not employ it? I am not going to scrap my plans. just from an I want to do that myself standpoint, but OpenSales has many more features than most self made systems.I have not tried either as of yet, but plan to very soon. . However, Zope is written in Python which is more familiar and attractive to me personally. Zope is a little ambiguous as to exactly what it does on the site, but it seems to claim that it can match all of the OpenSales features. Again if anybody has any real frontline experience in this arena or with these products then please let me know your thoughts for the future review. Thanks.Also lets all realize that in a day and age where we can get our free OS to run our free webserver to work with our free database and then use an entire application development to polish it, we should be quite thankful. Todays software possibilities are fantastic thanks to open source contributions. These are software days to remember!   OpenSales.Org