A recent project was to create a full e-commerce solution for a local aquatic shop. They already had an online store, using a heavily butchered version of OsCommerce. The brief was quite vague, basically to recreate all the features they currently had, and also to improve the Search Engine Friendliness of the site. A design was signed off, and so the work could begin on Aquatic-Store.co.uk

I have previously completed a couple of projects using Ruby on Rails, and thought this new project would be the perfect opportunity to create a e-commerce application using the powerful RoR framework.

The site combines utilises ActiveRecord which is built into the RoR framework, and allows for complex joins to be created in the database. By using a framework like this is takes away many of the daily tasks theat take up so much time. A simple command such as

Tag.find(:all)

Will collect all Tags from the database, and package all the objects into an array ready for use. Obviously things get more complex when you start refining the queries, but even then, it is much simplier than writing long SQL statements.

Aquatic Store combines RoR to create a powerful application, Script aculous to create a visually attractive design, and XHTML/CSS to allow the site to be fully accessible to the world. Protx provides a payment gateway, so customers can be confident that their transaction is fully secure.

Aquatic-Store has been live since the beginning of April, and has been very succesful since launch, and is always improving, not only in unique visitors everyday, but also its ROI.