News

Kartris .net cart in final stages of development

05 January 2009

Cactusoft is in the final stages of its biggest project ever - the development from scratch of a brand new shopping cart based on Microsoft's ASP.net platform. Building on the success of CactuShop, a classic ASP cart that has grown and developed since 1999, the new cart draws on a decade of ecommerce experience.

While the table structure is based to some degree on CactuShop, a full overhaul and redesign of key elements have improved the capabilites and optimized the performance. The database now supports unlimited languages rather than the 5 language limit of CactuShop. The decision was also made to support only MS SQL, which allows much tighter integration between the program code and the database.

All data access is via parametrized stored procedures called from the data access layer. This eliminates the risk of SQL injection, one of the most common vulnerabilities in database-driven web sites, and improves speed and reusability of code.

Rather than attempt to port ASP code to ASP.net, the program was written from scratch. Masterpages and themes are used for skinning, offering a big improvement in functionality over the templating system in CactuShop. New dynamic elements can be added as user controls, negating the need for custom tags and complex building up of HTML strings.

The new cart interface uses AJAX extensively in the front and back end to improve usability and speed, minimizing full page refreshes when paging or editing records for example. Support for SEO friendly URLs is built in, and there is the option to override default values for many search-engine important keywords and titles.

There is no release date confirmed at present, but we expect the first sites using Kartris to appear in the spring.