[nodejs] Use of Node / Express / MongoDB for a e-commerce website?

Hi there,

I am planning to use ExpressJS & MongoDB for a e-commerce website for
something that would have similar functionalities like groupon. Clients
would simply view the various pages and be able to purchase or book some of
the offers - and pay online.

I was wondering if any of you had experience with Express & MongoDB for
such an "easy" e-commerce website. What kind of problems / solutions would
you see or suggest?

Many thanks,
Hakan

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On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Adam Reynolds wrote:

You use an ACID compliant DB for e-commerce. This excludes Mongo.

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Hakan Guzelgoz <hakan.guzelgoz@gmail.com
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Hi there,

I am planning to use ExpressJS & MongoDB for a e-commerce website for
something that would have similar functionalities like groupon. Clients
would simply view the various pages and be able to purchase or book some of
the offers - and pay online.

I was wondering if any of you had experience with Express & MongoDB for
such an "easy" e-commerce website. What kind of problems / solutions would
you see or suggest?

Many thanks,
Hakan

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Karl wrote:

Postgresql, mysql (or the Mariadb mysql dropin, haven't tested that myself
yet with node)


El lunes, 22 de octubre de 2012 11:50:31 UTC+2, guzelgoz escribió:
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Ok, but is there any live e-commerce website running on Node? I mean I
would love to have their feedback / experience - what to consider or to
take care of?
Thx,
Hakan

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Karl <klr...@gmail.com <javascript:>>wrote:

On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 2:26:40 PM UTC-7, Alexey Petrushin wrote:
P.S. Does anyone really estimated how much will be losses in case of some
(0.00...X) transactions lost due to lack of transactional support in mongo?
I mean in stores like amazon - it's not a question, losses are huge, but
in case of an ordinary e-shop? Are they really so big? One developer cost
about 100 / per-year, so, mongo allows to build product faster and thus
save cost on development time (although, it's also subject to question).
The question is - what's higher - cost of development or lost transactions.

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Eric S wrote:


The last factor, and probably the most important one in my opinion, is
lost reputation. If you bought something online, never received anything,
and when you contacted the seller, they said that they had no record of
your order other than the CC charge, would you EVER use them again, even if
they promptly refunded your money?

This. This beyond anything else. You would have a major problem with
customer trust.

On a side note you can google mongodb transactions and see the
hassle/failure people have had trying to make transactional processes work
within Mongodb. It really is the wrong tool for the job at the (moment).

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:05 AM, Eric S <er...@geekzilla.org<javascript:>

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Karl wrote:

Trust is a big asset, I saw a recent study somewhere that webshoppers seem
to be considerably more loyal than one assumes. More reason not to take
chances. Risk taking was what got us into the current complex situation
(I'm in Spain)

El miércoles, 24 de octubre de 2012 09:51:23 UTC+2, Adam Reynolds escribió:
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What about a combined solution between MongoDB and Mysql where you would
use Mysql only for the transaction side of things and Mongo for all the
rest? Would this be worth investigating?


On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Karl <klr...@gmail.com <javascript:>>wrote:

I suspect you're thinking strictly in terms of lost sales. That's
the smallest of the three issues I see. Yes, lost sales are one
possible problem. Getting your database back into working
order is another possible problem, as both an expense in man
hours and site downtime, with the amount of work dependent
on quite a few things.

You are saying that biggest problem is that MongoDB allows DB to end up in
inconsistent state that causes errors in the Application and makes the
Application unusable untill the DB is fixed by hands.

I agree with You - it's the biggest problem with no-ACID database, but
it's not in any way related to E-Commerce.

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Just some warnings against mongo being a magic bullet:

P.S. Does anyone really estimated how much will be losses in case of some (0.00...X) transactions lost due to lack of transactional support in mongo?
I mean in stores like amazon - it's not a question, losses are huge, but in case of an ordinary e-shop? Are they really so big? One developer cost about 100 / per-year, so, mongo allows to build product faster and thus save cost on development time (although, it's also subject to question). The question is - what's higher - cost of development or lost transactions.
I think there are reasons why mongo is useful, but saving on developer costs is not one of them. When I hear people argue this position, they usually don't know much about mongo (and a lot of times aren't big on databases in general) and their hope is that they can build a web application without having to learn how their db works or how to administer it (or rather, learning mongo is much easier than learning mysql). I'm not saying people are dumb for hoping this will work, but I do believe it's incorrect and is based more on PR than reality. Having used both, my opinion is that all db's are complicated and it takes a fair amount of knowledge and effort to not screw it up when the stakes are high. If you want to speed up development (regardless of db), you can outsource the db work for a while and get consultants to train you and help you set it up and use it properly.
though Mongo is not ACID . however, when i raised that question to 10gen during a training, one of the solutions they suggest is to do it in code with two handshakes for committing data. not pretty but dorable.

Just some warnings against mongo being a magic bullet:

P.S. Does anyone really estimated how much will be losses in case of some
(0.00...X) transactions lost due to lack of transactional support in mongo?
I mean in stores like amazon - it's not a question, losses are huge, but
in case of an ordinary e-shop? Are they really so big? One developer cost
about 100 / per-year, so, mongo allows to build product faster and thus
save cost on development time (although, it's also subject to question).
The question is - what's higher - cost of development or lost transactions.


I think there are reasons why mongo is useful, but saving on developer
costs is not one of them. When I hear people argue this position, they
usually don't know much about mongo (and a lot of times aren't big on
databases in general) and their hope is that they can build a web
application without having to learn how their db works or how to administer
it (or rather, learning mongo is much easier than learning mysql). I'm not
saying people are dumb for hoping this will work, but I do believe it's
incorrect and is based more on PR than reality. Having used both, my
opinion is that all db's are complicated and it takes a fair amount of
knowledge and effort to not screw it up when the stakes are high. If you
want to speed up development (regardless of db), you can outsource the db
work for a while and get consultants to train you and help you set it up
and use it properly.

though Mongo is not ACID . however, when i raised that question to 10gen
during a training, one of the solutions they suggest is to do it in code
with two handshakes for committing data. not pretty but dorable.


This is total marketing FUD, Murvin I am glad you didn't buy it. Any form
of saying "just implement transactions yourself in your application" is
pretty damning - that's a *huge* burden the db vendor has just foisted onto
your dev team. You are not going to be saving any developer cycles if you
have to do that.

I'm not saying "don't use mongo ever." Just don't use mongo because you
think it will be easier than mysql, especially if you need transactions
(which you will if you are doing commerce). And if you're building
e-commerce and handling transactions and money, you should have staff
dedicated to db operations and security very early on in your startup. You
can't measure how badly things will go if going got messed up, it's
impossible to make a judgement like that ahead of time. It's an important
enough part of the system that things will move faster if you have someone
handling it full time.

Again, not anti-mongo, but I see a lot of dev's pinning their hopes on it
being a magic pony (and a lot of marketing encouraging this), and it make
me want to slap a big warning label on it.

Maybe postgres + elastic search is what you are looking for? It's a
pretty winning combo if you're building a store.

Ted

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:44:32 -0700, Alexey Petrushin wrote:

Hmmm, I spent a couple of Years working with JEE and Oracle big part of
it - fixing and optimizing SQL queries - this work made me totally hate
all this stuff, so, I'm biased a little against RDBMS.
As for developer productivity - I mentioned there that this is an open
question (lack of ACID is a big pain in the ass) - I personally feel
(just feel, didnt measured it exactly) that code for document oriented
database ends up more simple and flexible, and just looks more nice.

On 10/25/2012 06:58 PM, Stephen Handley wrote:
re: the idea of using sql for some transactions and mongo for an object
store

http://www.citusdata.com/blog/51-run-sql-on-mongodb
http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2012/10/18/connecting_to_redis_from_postgres/
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers

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Still, postgres foreign tables do not support SQL transactions, which
you'd need for an e-commerce product.

But its definitely interesting.

On Monday, October 22, 2012 10:50:31 AM UTC+1, guzelgoz wrote:

Hi there,

I am planning to use ExpressJS & MongoDB for a e-commerce website for
something that would have similar functionalities like groupon. Clients
would simply view the various pages and be able to purchase or book some of
the offers - and pay online.

I was wondering if any of you had experience with Express & MongoDB for
such an "easy" e-commerce website. What kind of problems / solutions would
you see or suggest?

Many thanks,
Hakan