On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial posted showing how to combine the Javascript power of Prototype along side PHP's adaptability to create a simple, ajax-driven shopping cart for your site.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library. The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

They start from the ground up - making the database tables, inserting some data - before writing up the simple PHP class with methods like deleteFromCart and getCart. This lays the foundation for the next article in the series where they add in a splash of ajax to make it a bit more user-friendly.

DeveloperTutorials.com has a new tutorial posted today about making the connection between a PHP/MySQL application and PayPal through the GoLive interface (don't worry - the source code's there too).

This tutorial is meant to show how GoLive users can integrate their PHP/MySql dynamic data with PayPal to create a simple online store with some advanced pricing features. This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with using dynamic content in GoLive and aren't too terrified of working with source code.

They start with the SQL to hold the item information (including price) and show briefly how to set it up with the Inspector helper in GoLive. They show how to grab the HTML off of the PaylPal site to link to the object and how to make this add it to the shopping cart on the PayPal website. To finish it off and make it look a little nicer, they also show how to add images to the layout for each of the items.

While frameworks seem to be popping out of the woodwork, Mike Willbanks has noticed something lacking - a good e-commerce framework that helps the developer do simple things like work with shopping carts or connect with payment APIs.

So here is my question, besides the really shitty shopping cart objects out there is there any true components for a framework that utilizes this functionality? I say shitty shopping cart objects because just about every single open source PHP shopping cart has some of the worst design aspects I have ever seen.

His complaint is that most of the shopping cart software out there is really just procedural (or bad) code shoved into classes and called good. He suggests a more patterned approach - maybe using a Factory on top of a base abstract model.

On Developer.com, Jason Gilmore has posted This new tutorial that steps you through the creation of an ajax-enabled shopping cart that combines PHP and Prototype.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library (introduced in an earlier installment). The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

He creates the database table first (bottom up approach), then moves to the PHP code to handle the request/responses for the shopping cart, and with a little bit of session magic to connect the cart to the user and the Prototype tossed in, the cart is complete.