OSCommerce 3 roadmap?

[steveharman]

Hi!

Is it planned for Konakart to follow the OSCommerce 3.x development roadmap?

Thanks,

Steve

[paolo]

Hi Steve,

We don't have plans to follow the osCommerce road map, although we've already implemented some of the features on that list.

Our first release back in early 2007 had an osCommerce compatible database and the functionality was very similar to that of the osCommerce base product although the underlying technology is totally different. Since then we've added many new proprietary features such as customer groups, one page checkout, bundled products, management of product quantities for different product options, product tags and tag groups,  merchandising functionality, promotion sub system, SEO, Birt reports, returns, support for different databases etc. In every release we provide a database script that can be run on the standard osCommerce database for any osCommerce user wanting to switch to KonaKart.

The reason for diverging from osCommerce is because we are aiming KonaKart at enterprise customers who tend to have different requirements compared to small store owners which are typical osCommerce users. For example, we've added auditing and roles to our Admin App which isn't functionality most osCommerce users really care about. We have SOAP APIs and support for databases such as Oracle, DB2 and SQLServer which are all requirements for larger users that need to comply with corporate wide technology decisions and need to interface to existing systems.

Are there any particular aspects of the OSCommerce 3.x development roadmap that you'd really like to see in KonaKart ?

-Paolo

[steveharman]

Hi Paolo,

Thanks for the very helpful reply.

We are at early-stage with an e-commerce project which in part will call upon a shopping cart system amongst other attributes.  I've been searching for an appropriate package for some time & found Konakart when looking into OSCommerce.  Our development is mostly Java based so Konakart has a great deal in its favor.

However.  There is a relatively 'new kid on the block' as I'm sure you know; Magento.  http://www.magentocommerce.com/  It's a PHP5 based system but seems to be gaining a great deal of popularity and client-side embraces many modern web standards such as CSS, XHMTL, AJAX etc which complements our other development.  It also makes for an visually rich environment for our potential users, something I've found lacking in OSCommerce et.al.

My gut tells me KonaKart is the right way for us to go, the enterprise features you mention will be extremely useful as we scale our solution.

Best Regards,

Steve

[paolo]

Hi Steve,

Although I agree with you that Magento have done a great job with their product, we don't really compete since most people that choose KonaKart, do so because of the underlying technology and so wouldn't consider a PHP solution, however good it may be.

Now as far as the UI is concerned, with KonaKart you can be as creative as you want because we supply all of the JSP and Struts source code which calls our API. One of the advantages of this architecture is that you can revolutionize the UI and still upgrade to the latest version of KonaKart very easily, since we go to great lengths to keep the API calls of new versions backwards compatible. If you take a look at http://www.konakart.com/konakart_cat_inspector/main.swf you'll see that it is a demo of a completely different UI (developed with OpenLaszlo technology) which however uses the same instance of the KonaKart engine as http://www.konakart.com/konakart/Welcome.do .

Our Admin App use AJAX technology (Google GWT) and so does the checkout process of the application. However, as I've just mentioned, you can add as many AJAX widgets as you'd like and completely modify the CSS style sheets etc. knowing that you can still benefit from new releases of KonaKart. There are some examples in our live sites section where our UI has been changed radically. E.g. http://www.evesrose.net/ , http://www.pc-adictos.com/ and ToyRaptor which is no longer live but you can still see a screenshot.

Paolo