Chapter 8. Shopping Cart

The Internet started out in the late 1960s as a government research project to link computers together in a robust network. As it evolved from this packet-switching experiment to a functional network capable of transferring information between computer systems, it became an important tool in academia. Mosaic, one of the first web browsers that was released in 1993, changed the face of the Internet forever by making the World Wide Web accessible to the ordinary person. Forward-thinking businessmen saw great potential in this new and growing medium and started advertising and selling their wares online.

The term e-commerce was coined to denote such electronic commerce that takes place over the Internet. E-commerce still flourishes even though the face of the Internet has changed many times over since its early days as new technologies and applications emerge. Over the past decade or so, consumer confidence has continued to rise and more and more people are making purchases online.

The shopping cart has come to be the ubiquitous e-commerce application, so in this chapter you'll write your own shopping cart around which you can build up an e-commerce website.