Reuse at the Conceptual Level

Frameworks are great ways of sharing architectural best practices, and open source applications (like Ray’s well known BlogCFC) are a great way of implementing a functionality quickly. The problem is that most of the time when you build an application, you have your own architecture and constraints and you’re really just looking for a starting point for the interfaces and data model to implement your solution.

I thought it might be useful to blog about an e-commerce application I’ll be rewriting over the next couple of days. I’m pretty sure most people have built at least a couple of shopping cart applications, but I thought it’d be interesting to share some ideas on one object model and set of methods to show how to use OO principles in a real world example and maybe to stimulate some discussion on different approaches to implementing this common use case at a conceptual rather than code level so we could all use any good ideas - irrespective of the framework or coding approaches we use.