PHP not transactable?

[Shalazar]

I was recently discussing with my brother plans to layout this e-commerce website in PHP and MySQL, and he mentioned the fact that this combination is not "transactable," meaning that purchases of items being listed through this method was not possible -- of course, an important function of the entire site.

Is this true?[nbsp][nbsp]Or is this a fallacy?

And would this be why people recomment ASP and SQL for e-commerce based sites?

[Justin]

I suspect that he is taking the term "transactions" too literally... I don't know exactly what "transactions" are in relation to a database, but I know MySQL doesn't support them. But if that means you can't write a PHP/MySQL program to handle, for example, billing customers on a monthly basis, sending out invoices, calculating pro-rate fees and late fees, and so on - well, let's just say I know it can ;)

At any rate, there is no reason at all that you can't write a shopping cart/store system using PHP/MySQL - I know it's been done before, and I know I could do it if given the time... I believe "transactions" has something to do with preventing one instance from overwriting the data of another, something you can do manually in the PHP code, or using "LOCK TABLES"...

Hope this helps.

PS - the reason so many sites use ASP/SQL/Access/etc is because they want to have the ability to run the same programs on their server as they run on their home/office systems, which are usually some variation of Windows, and ASP is pretty much NT. There are Windows versions of MySQL/PHP, but I know first hand that they are not as fast or reliable as the Unix counterparts.

A good programmer would of course have the ability to write programs for both platforms that interact together to form one large cross-platform system :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Rich]

I agree with Justin that PHP/MySQL have no limitations that would prevent designing a complete end-to-end ecommerce application.

The term transaction when used in reference to a database means that it can support "commit" and "rollback" functionality. A "transaction" is made of several fields in several records of several tables. Transaction-based processing insures that if the entire collection of records are not successfully updated, then the whole group (or the transaction) will fail. This functionality is required to insure the reliability of financial transactions. E-commerce merchants would normally not need to have this functionality.

If you need transaction-based functionality, you would select a commercial database engine that supports it like Oracle, etc.

Transaction-based processing also has little to do with the choice of Operating System vendor. The reason everyone recommends NT for e-commerce systems is because this is the target OS for which ALL of the major developers are writing applications for!

Rich