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By Ciwan - Tue 20 Sep 2011
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Hello Friends
I am new here, and I had never heard of Kartris before ! So I thought, why not go and check it out. My name is Ciwan, and I am a pretty good front-end web developer, but also know some back-end ASP.net MVC3. I was wondering .. is Kartris MVC3 driven ? or is it still on the old (not so cool in my opinion) Web Forms ? If it is MVC3 driven, I think I might starting coding themes for it ! Also, in your opinion, what attributes of Kartris, do you think help it stand out among the crowd of eCommerce solutions ? I look forward to your replies 
Ciwan.
PS. Apologies if this section of the forums is inappropriate for my post, I couldn't see an Introductions section, or a General Chat section.
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By Paul - Tue 20 Sep 2011
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Hi Ciwan,
Kartris is web forms rather than MVC.
I guess there are benefits and drawbacks of both systems but I think some of the negative views about web forms are largely down to misuse of it rather than use of it. I've seen other apps move to MVC to tackle perceived speed issues, without really analyzing where the real speed issues lie - i.e. overuse of repetitive and unnecessary queries which could be cached, poor database design, lack of indexes, poorly drafted joins, etc. The database is the real foundation that can give you speed and efficiency or a crawl, especially on large sites with a million plus items, where kartris really comes into its own.
Quite a few of the perceived benefits of MVC are filtering into webforms, interesting article here:
http://blog.evonet.com.au/post/2011/03/05/What%E2%80%99s-coming-in-the-next-version-of-ASPNET-Webforms.aspx
It's also interesting that some of the projects using MVC for the perceived lack of abstraction it gives ('close to the metal') then use database systems that provide abstraction from data and queries, rather than the precise control stored procedures and a DAL give. In my opinion, the key to speed of an app starts and ends with the database - it doesn't matter how clean and efficient your HTML and code is if you're accessing data through a layer of abstraction that runs inefficient queries that you have no way to tune up.
We have customers running kartris with over a million items and the sites don't run any noticeably slower than a site with 10 items. So I feel fairly happy with the choices we've made, and I think the improvements to the webforms framework that are coming will only add further to this.
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By Ciwan - Tue 20 Sep 2011
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Interesting, very interesting.
I fully agree with you that efficiency and speed start at the Database layer. But as far I know, there's nothing in MVC that stops you from doing all the database efficiency techniques you want on your application model, Unless you use something like Entity Framework Code First, in which case you'll suffer speed issues like nopCommerce does. Do you have statistics on how many people are using Kartris ? Also are you aware of any theme shops specific to Kartris ? Thank You.
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By Paul - Tue 20 Sep 2011
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It's true, there isn't anything in MVC which determines how to approach the database layer so it's entirely possible for example to use the same db we have, and have an MVC front end on it.
My point was really one of curiosity that the more fashionable coding environments these days stress closer control of the actual HTML code and reduced abstraction, whereas database layers the fashion seems to be the other way - with less control over query execution. My feeling is the performance difference, especially in certain cases, is going to be far bigger on the database layer than on the code execution and output HTML side - I still think the bottleneck with most slow apps is the database side and not the fact it's using web forms. It's good for consumers if there is a choice though, it wouldn't be good if everyone did things the same way.
It's difficult to say how many people are using kartris. I think originally the cart was largely UK/EU oriented because of our backgrounds, but the next version will make it much easier to setup and switch between US/Canada/EU/Other tax modes, so I think it will be far easier for people in those countries to set it up. On the MS web app gallery there has been tens of thousands of downloads, and I think there are already several hundred users either running stores or developing them now.
Much of our development is guided by the feedback we get as well as the sites we build with kartris ourselves. I think for the next few releases our aim is to optimize and refine the core we have rather than do any radical rewrites; I think there is a lot of performance still to be gained through this and we want to make it super fast and stable as well as adding in some new features and other improvements along the way.
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By Ciwan - Tue 20 Sep 2011
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I do know what you mean, I too have noticed people stressing that.
I can't speak much for core development, but from a front-end developer's point of view, the MVC Framework is like heaven to us.
We get absolute 100% full control of every single html tag and that enables us to do some really fancy work with the way the store looks, and if you're good at it .. you can create designs that subconsciously tell the user " buy it, buy it, buy it " 
Now obviously, you can do the same thing with a Web Forms application, but it is so much more hassle, and sometimes (in certain situations) even after spending hours, you can't get it to look exactly the way you want ! 
You guys seem to know what you're doing when it comes to database optimization, my hope is you keep that, and couple it with MVC. Though I'm sure that won't be any time soon.
Either way, I'll keep an eye on development of Kartris.
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