Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
« 1GHz processor for old Macs Delay! No! »
It’s live!
The new version of website/webstore that I’ve been doing for work is now “live.” It’s been largely done and in-use by a handful of customers for several months, but we finally flipped the switch and moved it over the “www” address. It’s a custom .NET site, all written in C# that fully integrates with our Axapta ERP backend. Unfortunately, much of the fun stuff is not public as we’re only using the webstore features for select customers right now — stuff like order status, shipment tracking, saved carts, etc.
I am, however, pretty proud of the X-HTML valid, pure CSS layout and printer-friendly product guide that’s fully updated daily from our ERP ( with live customer pricing for logged in customers ).
January 6th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
I rooted around a bit — that’s some dead sexy code. The fade-in/flash
nav items JS trick on the home page is pretty fun. Most amazing of all,
you made it work well in that stinky ol’ dog of a browser, Internet
Explorer. Bravo!
Sean
January 6th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
On Jan 6, 2005, at 5:02 PM, Sean McMains wrote:
> Most amazing of all,
> you made it work well in that stinky ol’ dog of a browser, Internet
> Explorer. Bravo!
If you think it’s hard to get it working in IE, try getting ASP.NET to
spit out valid X-HTML!
g.
January 7th, 2005 at 4:33 am
Wow, that looks pretty impressive. Coming from the web thing and slowly moving into the whole ERP area, I think I can sort of see the work in that.
I’d be interested in your reasons to write your own application instead of using the Enterprise Portal that comes with Axapta, though.
January 7th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
On Jan 7, 2005, at 4:39 AM, Dominik Schwind wrote:
> Wow, that looks pretty impressive.
Thanks.
> Coming from the web thing and slowly moving into the whole ERP area, I
> think I can sort of see the work in that.
> I’d be interested in your reasons to write your own application
> instead of using the Enterprise Portal that comes with Axapta, though.
Well, there’s a number of…including, but not limited to:
Performance. The ePortal is kinda slow and requires all traffic to be
handled by your production ERP server. 90%+ of our web traffic never
really needs to hit Axapta — it’s search engines, guest users, etc.,
so why burden the ERP.
Reliability. I heard Axapta’s COM Connector can get a bit bogged down
with a heavy transaction load.
Security. Mimimize the amount of un-necessary direct access to the ERP
environment where poor configuration choices could open your corporate
data and financials to the web-at-large.
Development ease. Axapta’s development environment is a great database
application IDE. It’s not a great web application IDE.
Compatibility. The ePortal really only works in IE/Window and spits
out a lot of really bad HTML. If I was going to have to do all the
work to fix that, I’d just assume do it elsewhere.
g.