Building an ASP.NET AJAX Server-Centric Based Online Shopping Website
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Social sites may have the spotlight at the moment, but online shopping sites have held an important place in the Internet economy for years. With electronic commerce so vital, it shouldn't be surprising that ASP.NET offers a useful framework, dubbed ASP.NET AJAX, to help you build such a site. This article, the first of eleven parts, starts you off on a step-by-step journey to building the e-commerce site of your dreams.
A downloadable .rar file is available for this article.
On the one hand, with the popularity of Internet applications, electronic commerce ("EC" for short) has been developing more and more quickly. As a new type of commerce running model and based upon the open Internet environments and browser/server applications, EC has achieved the goals of online shopping for customers, online bargaining between the dealers, and online payment. Business to business (B2B) represents the electronic commerce activities between enterprises whereas business to customer (B2C) is the direct activities between the merchants and customers, i.e. the so-called online shopping. Therefore, enterprises and merchants can make full use of network infrastructures, payment platforms, safety platforms, and management platforms supplied by electronic commerce cities to run their own business activities more efficiently and with lower cost.
On the other hand, AJAX, as the "soul" of web 2.0, has been attracting more and more web application developers. Certainly, ASP.NET AJAX (previously named "ATLAS"), as an all-sided AJAX framework which is mainly based on the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 platform and wholeheartedly supported by developer communities, has interested a large number of AJAX developers. In a nutshell, the solutions provided by the ASP.NET AJAX framework can be divided into two types of programming models: the server-centric programming model and the client-centric programming model.
In this long (11-part) series, you will learn step by step to build an ASP.NET AJAX server-centric based online shopping website. Please notice that, though this demo application seems pretty long, it is in fact still easy to comprehend in its inner logic. Of course, introducing the ASP.NET AJAX framework to some degree will add some difficulty in grasping the core idea of this application.
Taking one with the other, the online shopping website is a B2C system. It has achieved nearly all the common routines associated with typical online shopping services, including browsing and buying products, creating orders, making comments on the related goods, leaving the words, and managing the users. Also, the management-related tasks such as users, roles, and safety are provided all together. In addition, this application includes an information center to help the users keep track of the latest trends on the online shopping website.
Author's Note: To follow along with the online shopping demonstration application in this article, you're assumed to have installed Visual Studio 2005, as well as at least these two components of the ASP.NET AJAX framework: ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. And also, it is highly suggested that you download the source files accompanying this article to give them further study.
Next: About the Server-Centric Programming Model >>
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