Ed Ryan wrote: > Some departments would also like to accept online payments from the > public using a shopping cart or similiar mechanism.
I also would like to do that. With Cache' as it is today there is a serious risk. The risk if that you will get "Cannot allocate a license" errors when serving CSPs. My discussion with ISC about this indicated that (1) I could buy an unlimited license - at a price around 50% of annual gross sales, and (2) an unlimited license is really limited, but just set a few hundred higher than what they think I will actually use. My experience with developing CSPs is that if the programmer does something wrong, like have a bug, it is very easy to consume all license units in a minute, and there is no way to recover them in less than the grace period, even restarting Cache' doesn't help. This greatly hinders debugging, which is bad if you are trying new things and get a lot of bugs. Perl is a much more reliable alternative for serving a shopping cart, at least it won't deliberately deny access to your citizen-customers. My opinion is that shopping carts are not a priority for ISC to support with Cache'. Their licensing model is geared toward workstations or deployed intranet applications. The model is a nightmare for developing and for public www commerce or trying to compete against MySQL and free carts.
