We are imminently approaching the launch of our first RIA E-Commerce application utilizing the power of Flex 2. We’ve built a dynamic front end product browser and shopping cart that is managed by a complete set of store administration tools integrated into i3SiteTools, DP’s site management system. I’d like to take the time to relate a few of the finer points and pitfalls we’ve encountered during our setup and development process.

i3SiteTools is our custom content management system (CMS) here at Digital Positions. We use i3SiteTools as the fouindation for many of our clients’ websites and web applications. Over the last five years, our team has taken great steps to constantly improve upon the code base and feature set. One of our latest initiatives has been to move i3SiteTools into a more Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and modular world.

For those of you looking at the screen wondering what OOP is and why we want this let me digress a bit.

OOP stands for Object Orient Programming, as mentioned above, and it’s basically a way of writing code which can build upon other bits of code. So this would allow us to write a newsletter module for client A and later on when client E wants one too we can simply drop it in, customize the display for this client and, voila! they have a nice little newsletter tool. This ability to develop code faster and more consistently means our clients will be able to get greater bang for their buck ... faster.

OOP programming has a lot of benefits for us as developers as well as benefits for our clients. You’ll start to see more of this as we dive deeper into the OOP mindset and as I start to talk more about our experience in future blog posts.

If you’ve got questions feel free to leave me a comment.