JavaScript for E-Commerce

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Please note that this tutorial was first published in the year 2000, and is based on work conducted between 1997 and 2000. While we trust that it still constitutes useful tutorial material, it should not necessarily be construed as to impart best practice in the year 2016. For more details please see this blog post.

Introduction

The beauty of the JavaScript language is that it executes on the client PC, rather than the server, providing the user with an instant response to an action.

If a good balance between server side execution and client side execution is struck, the user can be given a richer experience, and the server can be spared some of its load.

This document has two goals:

  1. To demonstrate that the scope of the JavaScript language extends far beyond making already boring web pages even more annoying.

  2. To provide a framework that a web developer can use to build an online shop.

This document assumes that you are familiar with the JavaScript language, and are comfortable defining JavaScript objects, programmatically manipulating HTML forms, generating documents dynamically with document.write() and referring to objects and variables in different frames. Some good JavaScript references can be found on the Mozilla developer site at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript.

Additionally, you should be comfortable performing minor modifications to Perl scripts, and installing them on web servers, as a small Perl script is discussed in chapter five. A good place to look for Perl references is http://www.perl.com/.

A document such as this is more or less useless unless built around a practical application. To this end, I will be using an online music shop as the example.


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This tutorial has been translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Jovana Milutinovich from Webhostinggeeks.com.

This tutorial has been translated to Slovak by Juraj Rehorovsky from Coupofy team.

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