TomatoCart - New Generation Open Source eCommerce

TomatoCart’s translations are growing well recently. We are glad to see another two languages in, Thai and Azerbaijani. All the others are making progress, the Chinese Simplified fully translated into.

And we now look for translation coordinators. If you’d like to make contributes, welcome and email us. Your role is to manage a TomatoCart translation, selecting among translators, collecting from them and validating. You will get full-scale technical support. Besides, you will have some exposure under Translations in the form of personal account.

Those with translation experience at TomatoCart will be considered first.

——“ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .”

——“ Something vague…”

The following toy template is developed by the TomatoCart Team, and it will be free provided in the TomatoCart Demo store. Do you like it or have some suggestions on this template? Please let us know.

Introduction

This is a tutorial on how to make a module for the web desktop admin panel of TomatoCart. There are two parts in this tutorial; the first part contains a short description of the admin panels architecture and the second part is a step-by-step walkthrough on creating products categories grid window in the admin panel.

TomatoCart is still in alpha release and its architecture will change in future, therefore this tutorial is only for TomatoCart Alpha release 1 and 2. It will be change later according to the change in the TomatoCart architecture.

TomatoCart Admin Panel's Architecture

TomatoCart is a fork project of osCommerce 3, therefore it derives most of the business logic and the architecture from osCommerce 3. The admin panel of osCommerce 3 is designed base on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture; while the TomatoCart’s web desktop is based on RIA framework. Comparing to web-based MVC architecture, RIA architecture have several differences:

1. RIA’s user interface is created by Javascript not plain HTML page
2. The interactions between client and server is through Ajax instead of page submissions
3. In MVC the controller handles the input event from the user interface and forwards the page to different view according to the action process result; while in RIA the GUI code update the user interface according to the Ajax result.